


Level Up

by deniigiq



Series: Inimitable Verse [2]
Category: Daredevil (TV), Deadpool - All Media Types, Spider-Man - All Media Types, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Defenders (Marvel TV)
Genre: Dark Magic, Gen, Near Death Experiences, Team Bonding, Team Dynamics, Team as Family, Time Travel, kind of, matt murdock is very catholic and does not fuck with witches, may parker is a witch, more like poorly conducted occultism, peter is half of a witch
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-27
Updated: 2018-08-27
Packaged: 2019-07-03 07:22:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 28,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15814164
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deniigiq/pseuds/deniigiq
Summary: “Alright, we’re done,” Daredevil suddenly announced and made for the door.Peter threw a hand out, stuffed it into a gap in his armor and, to the trio’s shock, physically dragged him back. Murdock leaned hard out of the grip, but Peter didn’t seem bothered by that.“Double D, not everything’s cursed,” he lectured, “And not all curses are bad, that’s just what Christians tell other people to destabilize their societies.”(Matt and Peter accidentally get involved in some witchy business, and the Spidey trio have to go back and convince their fifteen-year-old fearless leader to help them solve it)





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> this is the time travel fic nobody asked for
> 
> it comes after Inimitable, so I strongly recommend reading that one first or you might be super confused. or don't, i don't know your life

Sitting on a roof in the Bronx in the chill of autumn, Louis made the mistake of wondering out loud if there were like, levels of being a superhero.

Angel and Miles abandoned their latest argument to turn to him, intrigued. It was cold enough that Angel had wrapped a giant faux-fur scarf over her suit and was sitting comfortably on the edge of fashionable and looking like a giant q-tip. He himself had dug out a black beanie before coming out that night. He’d wondered if they were supposed to expect some kind of winter uniform or if Spidey just didn’t feel the cold. Knowing him, he probably just didn’t feel the cold.

“Well, go on,” Angel encouraged with her hands still locked over Miles’s ears. The kid was learning that complaining around Angel resulted in immediate problem-solving you were guaranteed to hate. Unfortunately, he was learning the hard way.

“I mean, obviously there are like, levels of superheroes,” Louis clarified, “But I wonder if there’s like a scale; like, you do such-and-such training and you’re a beginner. You fight X number of bosses and you’re intermediate. You know? That kind of thing?”

Angel chewed on this while Miles wriggled out of her grasp.

“Wouldn’t that involve coordination?” he pointed out, “And like, organization and _agreement_? I don’t know if even the Avengers are capable of that, why would anyone else at street level be?”

“You’re just pissed because you’re still level one,” Angel said. He mugged back at her.

“You’re level one, too.”

She stared long enough to make Miles uncomfortable. He shoved her shoulder and she shoved him harder, nearly off the side of the roof. Spidey was late, but this time he’d had the decency to text them. Something about an emergency at the lab.

Louis suspected that Stark had put Spidey on staff as a Crisis Manager and just hadn’t told him that that was his official title. All the guy did was handle emergencies, which he was actually perfect for. His whole blasé attitude in the face of serious danger thing and his uncomfortable tendency to write off bodily harm as an annoyance rather than a threat made him a fairly unshakable guy. Louis had personally seen him wander into a burning building and emerge unscathed, damn near whistling. Burning buildings, fighting rapists. All’s in a day of work for Spiderman. When asked what the fuck he was thinking, he’d just shrugged and said “well, you gotta close all the fire doors before you leave, you know?”

Which.

Dude.

Safety first, yes, but also what the fuck.

“If we’re all level one—” he wondered.

“Hey, _we’re_ at least level two,” Angel interjected, waving between Louis and herself.

“Then where do you think Spidey is?” he finished.

A thoughtful pause.

“We need better parameters,” Miles declared, having defended and regained his perch from Angel. She was watching him with indulgence. Louis gave her ten seconds before she tried to shove him off again. He considered intervening, but Miles was sticky like Spidey, he wasn’t going to get hurt too badly if he fell of the building.

“Explain,” Louis told him.

“Well, we don’t actually know what a one is and how it’s different from a two. If we know what the end goal is, then we’ll know where we fit and we’ll know where Spidey fits.”

“Spidey’s the end goal,” Angel informed them.

Another thoughtful pause.

“Never mind, Spidey’s like a six. Maybe a seven,” she amended. “Compared to like Cap or Iron Man, you know.”

Miles was offended on Spidey’s behalf.

“That’s not fair, he’s gotta be at least an eight.”

Angel was not to be swayed.

“If aliens were attacking the city, would you feel safer knowing Iron Man was coming or Spiderman?”

Louis gave her kudos for a good argument. He hadn’t really thought about it that way. The three of them spent most of their time pretty wrapped up in being or becoming Spiderman.

“Well, Iron Man, I guess. But that’s only ‘cause he comes with extra resources,” Miles said.

“Alright, so resources gotta be on the scale, then, right?” Angel asked. Miles pouted at the argument he was suddenly losing. Angel grinned at him and carried on, “Yeah, that’s what I thought. Spidey’s got jack in the resources department and what he does have is Iron Man sanctioned. So like I said, a seven at most.”

“Alright,” Miles said, “What about us then? What makes a level one? Or is everyone a level one to begin with? Is there a level zero?”

Louis knew how to settle this. He dug out his phone. The other two kept on squabbling beside him. He opened google and searched ‘earliest spiderman footage’ and was rewarded with a video of a red and blue blur hurtling past the top frame of the camera. It wasn’t very enlightening. He clicked on one of the videos on the side titled “SPIDER-MAN IN NYC?”

That one was a little better, showing the same red and blue blur leap up the side of a building, away from a confrontation with a harried looking guy with a gun. Spidey paused at the top, and then held his hand down towards the guy; there was another blur of movement and the guy’s hand, the one holding the gun, flew back and he clocked himself in the head and dropped to the ground in shock. Spidey hesitated just long enough to make sure the guy wasn’t dead, then pulled himself up the rest of the building and disappeared over the edge.

Louis didn’t know if that could be classified as superhero-ing or just a web-test.

He rewound the video and paused it to look at little baby Spidey. He evidently hadn’t had the suit at that point and was just wearing a giant hoodie with the arms cut off. Why the fuck Spidey had picked fire engine red, Louis would never know.

Actually, no that wasn’t true, he knew now that Spidey wanted to make himself a target to draw attention away from victims and potential victims, but why would he decide that red was his starting point? He could not possibly have woken up on day one with his new powers and decided, ‘yeah, I think I want people to shoot at me. That’s definitely for the greater good.’ Like, that had to have been a day two decision at least.

The other two noticed his silence and crowded over to see what he was looking at. He played the video again for their benefit.

“Level one?” he offered.

“What the fuck is that costume?” Angel asked, enraptured.

“I don’t think that counts,” Miles said. Angel wormed an arm under Louis’s and tapped on one of the other videos.

It was only twenty seconds long, but they were all fucking dying with laughter. Spidey had always been known for being chatty, but there was nothing which could have prepared Louis for his tiny pre-pubescent voice shrieking ‘Hey, is this anyone’s bike?’ while shaking said bike at people in the street in Queens.

“Level one?” he asked through his tears.

“Level one,” the others agreed.

“Excuse the fuck outta you,” Spidey snapped. They all jumped. “That was at least a level two.”

He’d been there the whole time. The asshole.

“Dude,” Angel accused. He shrugged and stood on his toes to see the video over Louis’s shoulder. He smelled kind of like burnt oil? He snickered to himself and then abandoned them to go look out at the city. He’d put some kind of tech in his suit which helped him see a lot of shit the others couldn’t.

“Hear anything from our happy trafficker?” he asked.

“Just radio silence,” Louis told him, pocketing his phone.

Miles hopped over to join Spidey on the edge of the building. He was harder to see against the sky since Spidey had made his suit black. He’d leveled a finger at Miles when he complained that everyone else got red and told him that stealth was a virtue and that complaints would be met with the revocation of any and all engineered outerwear.

“Are we level twos?” he asked Spidey. Spidey just snorted in amusement.

“Y’all need a rubric before you start ranking people,” he said. He spun around. “So the bad news is that it looks like our target’s not out tonight. The good news is that we’ve got an armed robbery happening about twelve blocks down, a bunch of people trying to break into a bank, and a guy who seems a bit lost and confused up north. Take your pick, children.”

Mile lit up immediately.

“I want the bank,” he declared. It was a bit unusual for him, but he was getting more daring lately, so Louis let it go.

“Great,” Spidey said, “Angel go with him to the bank. Remember to wave at the cameras before you go. Louis?”

“I can help the old man,” he said.

“He’s not old, maybe about 30,” Spidey clarified, “Might need a rehab. If he’s tweaking out, just get him somewhere safe and sit with him for a little while, you know the drill. He’s not gonna hurt you. I’m off to get shot at, I guess. Meet y’all back here at 3, yeah?”

They all confirmed this and split up for the night.

 

 

That was kind of how it went most nights they went out, but there was something prickling at the back of Louis’s head lately. He didn’t know how to describe it, his mama had always said that she had it, too. It always happened just before something bad did.

He got the bright idea a few days after sitting with the junkie sobbing in the alleyway to ask Miles if he felt it too. Miles had what Spidey called a Spidey Sense, or in his words, ‘a useless ass, dramatic-ass, OCD, piece of shit feeling,’ which told him when things around him presented an imminent danger. Miles’s wasn’t nearly that bad, he informed them; he said that he felt it most when he and Spidey got near each other. He said it pinged like a point on radar. It didn’t quite hurt, just felt like a static shock.

Spidey laughed and then asked him if he wanted to trade. Spidey was always lamenting the fact that he couldn’t go back in time and trade bio-engineered spiders with Miles. Louis personally wasn’t sure that this would solve any of his issues, but he bit that one back because he valued the relationship he and Spidey had built thus far.

When he asked Miles if he’d felt anything weird, the kid looked shocked, then relieved.

“Yeah, a lot. A lot, a lot. It’s almost, like, painful,” he said. He fell quiet, unsure for a minute, then said,  “Do you think we should ask Spidey about it?”

Yes, yes, he did.

They picked Angel up from work before they went to the lab because, whether they wanted to admit it or not, Angel was Spidey’s favorite and he was really bad at lying to her. She was wearing a bright orange apron with ‘Layla’s Organics’ embroidered on the front when they found her stacking cans on Aisle 5.

Angel worked two jobs and went to college at night. For all their joking and joshing and poking fun, she was a serious gal. She lived at home and helped her family pay rent and helped her mom pay for extra services for her little sister who had a learning disability. When Miles found out about her ‘tragic backstory’ (as she called them), he’d asked Louis if she wasn’t secretly Superman just doing them all a favor.

If Superman was actually a five foot nothing Latina, he’d told him, then sure.

Angel stared at them like they were morons from the floor for a little while before she decided that they weren’t joking around. She was off in fifteen, and she didn’t have a shift at the other place that night, she told them. On the way out, she grabbed a different apron from her cubby in the back and stuffed it in her bag.

It was a Saturday, which meant nothing at all in the working world of things, but it meant that when they got to Stark Industries, it wasn’t as busy as it usually was.

Miles hadn’t been there with them yet, so they tried to keep him on track as they wove their way over to the receptionist for the labs.

“Can we talk to Peter Parker for a minute?” Louis asked her. She looked at her computer.

“You have an appointment?” she asked.

“No, but it’s important, tell him it’s Louis and he’ll get it.” She was skeptical but picked up the phone and dialed the lab’s extension.

“Mr. Parker, I have another guest here to see you? His name is Louis. He says it’s important. Is that a yes? Alright, I’ll send them down.”

They were directed to the elevator and told to exit on floor 36.

 

 

Miles, the nerd child he was, was beside himself seeing the lab for the first time. It was a little embarrassing to have to go back and keep grabbing him and dragging him away from the tables. Angel eventually locked a hand around the back of his neck and marched him in front of her to the line of offices at the back of the room.

It was cute how Stark Industries had tried to friendly-up their space. All the office doors had big nametags on them, like the ones taped on bedroom doors in college dorms. Someone had tacked a giant cut-out of Eeyore to Spidey’s.

People were talking behind the door, multiple people, so Louis was hesitant to knock. Angel got tired of his waffling and made Miles do it.

Parker opened the door saying over his shoulder,

“Do not touch, do not look, do not threaten, _please_ , MJ.”

Angel’s interest went from zero to sixty. Louis could practically see the energy radiating off of her, like someone had plugged in her halo.

MJ was a no-no topic. Spidey’s hacker best friend had mentioned the mysterious MJ exactly once and Spidey had barred all further discussion. Which meant, of course, that MJ was Angel’s favorite topic of discussion. None of the three of them had any fucking clue who MJ was. MJ could be Michael Jordan for all they knew. Or a cat on a motorcycle. A failed science experiment. None that mattered, however; the lack of corporeal form kind of added to MJ’s power. When Spidey got sassy, Angel threw out a ‘well, what would _MJ_ think of that, hmm?’ and it was like a magic ‘fuck off’ switch, because that was the only thing Spidey was capable of saying in response.

“No promises,” a woman’s voice said behind the door. Spidey opened it just enough to stick his head out and glare at them.

“You have twenty seconds,” he said. He was undeniably more professional-looking in a lab coat with safety goggles hanging around his neck.

“What are you guys making?” Miles asked excitedly. Spidey softened a little at his excitement, then remembered himself.

“Secrets. Fifteen seconds.”

“Is that a girl in there?” Angel asked. Spidey’s eyebrows went flat.

“So you’ll need to sign out before you leave,” he said.

“Wait,” Louis intervened before the door closed entirely, “It’s, uh. You know. Related.”

Spidey whacked his head against the other side of door and sighed so hard that Louis worried he might have just powered off.

“Come in,” he grumbled, defeated.

He swung the door open wide to let them enter.

 

 

MJ was a light-skinned gal with dark eyes and the flattest, most neutral expression Louis had seen in his life. She was stupidly suave and beautiful and honestly, truly did not appear to be trying. Her hair was swept to the side and on top of her black top and jeans, she was wearing a lab coat. The name on the breast pocket didn’t match Spidey’s. It just said M. Jones with a crest underneath. She wore sneakers.

She surveyed the three of them and Louis felt a little like he was standing for judgement before St. fucking Peter. She smirked at their discomfort and grinned when Spidey collapsed in his desk chair.

“Go ahead,” he groaned into the table. She started grinning at him.

“These are the babies?” she asked in the tone of someone who already knew damn well what she was talking about.

“Just skip to the harassment,” Spidey told the table.  She kept her smirk and said nothing. He peeked through an elbow suspiciously.

“I don’t live to harass you, Parker,” she said smoothly. Then she reached across his head and stole the packet of chips on the desk there. She waved a hand magnanimously, as if to say, ‘carry on.’ Spidey squinted hard enough there was a wrinkle between his eyes. Then he snapped his head to the three of them.

“Out with it.”

“Hey,” MJ snapped, tone suddenly flat and dark, “Be nice.” He cringed and shied away from her a bit.

Angel looked like she’d found God and he’d been waiting in a robotics lab her entire life. Louis opened and closed his mouth a few times, trying to articulate non-stupidly why they were there.

Spidey rolled his eyes to the ceiling.

“She knows, Louis, it’s fine.”

MJ smirked and shoved a handful of chips in her mouth. He didn’t know why it was intimidating, but it was.

“Uh,” was all he could come up with.

“Something bad is coming,” Miles suddenly announced for all of them. Spidey cocked his head and held Miles’s eyes.

“It is,” he said slowly. Not a question.

“You know what it is?” Louis collected himself enough to ask. MJ shifted in her seat, catlike. Spidey looked at her and she met his eye easily.

“Not for sure. Yet.”

 

 

It turned out that MJ was Spidey’s other best friend. He had her and he had the hacker guy, Ned, and those were his best pals. And he didn’t want anyone near MJ because people loved to target her. Loved it. More than they liked to target Ned, apparently. Precisely because people thought they were together.

“But you guys _are_ dating?” Angel agitated when they met Spidey at his apartment the following Wednesday evening. He squinted at her as though trying to decide whether or not to slam the door in their faces.

“Not dating,” MJ clarified on the couch in the living room. It was an old brown leather one covered with a million pillows. MJ had appropriated the largest of them and was sitting on the floor, barefoot,  tapping away at her phone.

Angel stared at her around Spidey in the doorway.

“Maybe dating?” she asked hopefully. Spidey groaned and herded them all inside.

Once everyone was situated he sat down on the floor beside MJ.

“Where do I even start?” he asked her.

From this Louis determined that, when MJ was present, MJ was head of operations. It wasn’t necessarily a bad thing, it was just a little jarring to see Spidey hand over command like that. He typically only gave over to Wade or Daredevil or someone at that level. And as far as Louis could tell, MJ was just a normal like them.

“Parker’s a homing device for crazy,” she said steadily, not looking up from her phone, “But this is out of even his league. My lab is picking up some crazy shit outside the animals and his lab is getting some weird readings from their tin-can-contraptions. Something is going on out there that someone doesn’t want us to know about.”

Spidey sighed and hung his elbows on his knees.

“It’s always the fucking way, isn’t it?” He asked. MJ tilted her head at him. He grimaced a little.

“I’m gonna find out what,” she announced, or rather, informed him, firmly.

“Because that always goes well for us.”

Louis wondered if they’d forgotten there were other people in the room.

“Yes,” MJ said with gravitas, “It does. So, stop being a shithead.”

Louis hadn’t realized Spidey was doing anything.

“Make me,” he spat.

MJ went still and set her phone down on the floor next to her. Spidey threw his arms over his face for protection, which was really all Louis needed to see to understand the entirety of their relationship.

“You wanna run that by me again?” MJ asked evenly. Spidey didn’t respond besides hunkering down a little more. “That’s what I thought, bitch.”

She turned and addressed their little trio of inexperience. “You in or what?”

“You haven’t told us what it is we’re in for,” Miles pointed out. She stared at him with undue heat. Spidey leaned out from behind her so that he could address the kid and told him miserably,

“She’s not gonna.”

Angel raised an eyebrow at the two of them.

“Are _you_?” she asked.

Spidey opened his mouth, but MJ answered for him.

“Nope. That’s not the question. The question is, are you in or are you out? ‘Cause if you’re not down, it’s fine, I’ve got a list of replacements.”

What the fuck, Spidey, who the hell is this woman? Just flounces on in, starts asking questions and giving no answers. That was some rude shit. And Louis felt disrespected.

Spidey, however, just threw his hands up, lolled back, and flopped sideways onto the floor in defeat. Which again, was super unlike him. Especially with the three of them. MJ carefully balanced her giant throw pillow on top of him and popped up onto her knees to pluck another off the couch.

“Peter’s in,” MJ said breezily, “So if that’s who you’re looking to, you’ve got your answer.”

Angel looked at Louis and he looked back, and after a careful moment of hesitation shrugged. Whatever it was, they’d probably be dragged into it anyways, rude gal or no. Miles looked up at him for confirmation, then over at Angel for double confirmation and then they all returned to MJ, who was petting her new pillow patiently.

“Alright, we’re in,” Angel said.

 

 

“Peter, what the fuck?” was Ned’s response to their whole troop arriving unannounced to his door at 8pm on a Wednesday. Spidey just draped himself all over him and made plaintive noises. He thumbed back at MJ. She waved. Ned glanced down at Spidey in his arms, and then at MJ again. Then he gave them all a dirty look.

“Why is it that when _I_ say it’s a conspiracy, nobody listens, but when _you_ do it, it’s totally fine and we should do something about it?” he grumbled after MJ, who’d taken the initiative to invade his house.

She started stacking the shit on his table to make more room for more people to sit.

“Because I’m right,” she said simply. Spidey bolted up.

“You could not be,” he countered hopefully. Both MJ and Ned gave him unimpressed expressions while ushering the rest of them inside. He groaned and moved to join them in stacking. “I’m just saying.”

The table was cleared and Ned encouraged them all to sit there or on the couch. Spidey took the time to introduce him to Miles who was always shy about meeting Spidey’s associates. He was still terrified of Deadpool and wanted nothing to do with any of the Fantastic Four.

Once everyone was seated Ned started asking the big questions, and it became clear that his role on the original Spidey team was pissing MJ off and getting hit by couch cushions.

“Is it the mole people?” understandably got this reaction. As did, “okay, but have you considered the Illuminati?”

“Peter, make her stop,” Ned begged him after the second assault. Spidey just raised an eyebrow and glanced between the two of them. Ned nodded with empathy and acceptance and endured the rest of the attack with grace.

“As I was saying,” MJ said, once the rage had subsided, “There’s something going on and I don’t like it. Someone’s gotta be making something or doing something that’s making enough energy to fuck with our instruments.”

“It’s gotta be HYDRA,” Ned said seriously. Spidey reached up and caught the incoming cushion before it made impact. He chucked it over by Angel.

“It’s not HYDRA,” he told Ned sympathetically. “We were actually wondering if you’d heard anything in your channels.”

Ned lit up.

“Oh yeah, actually, now that you mention it. Some people are talking about a sinkhole in Midtown.”

A sinkhole? _That_ sinkhole? If Louis remembered correctly, it had turned up ages ago. No one had been able to fill it in and people kept jumping down in it and dying like idiots. The city had built a huge dome over it, like a cap, to keep people out.

Spidey frowned and chewed his lip.

“Say more,” MJ said.

“Well, people are saying it’s putting off crazy energy,” Ned told them, “I don’t actually know if it’s true, but word is that something really terrible happened there, but no one, not even SHIELD, knows what.”

“SHIELD knows everything,” Angel interrupted. Ned tipped his head back and forth in skepticism.

“Don’t sinkholes, uh, suck?” Louis pointed out. “If that’s the case, how could they put out energy?”

Ned opened, then closed his mouth. He furrowed his brow and then conceded the point. MJ put an elbow on the table and planted her chin on her palm.

“Okay, let’s say it’s not the sinkhole. Let’s say it’s something else. Suggestions?”

“It’s the sinkhole,” Spidey said definitively.

Silence.

“You knew,” MJ said evenly. Then corrected herself, “You know.”

Spidey wrung his hands.

“Peter,” Ned said gently.

“It’s a secret,” Spidey said, “A big one. An important one. I’m not supposed to know; no one is supposed to know, but one person told me and now I’m fucked. He said he’d murder me if I told anyone.”

“Peter,” MJ said warningly.

Spidey wrung his hands harder.

“Stark?” Ned asked. Spidey shook his head. “Pym? Cap? Wilson? Coulson? Castle?” Spidey shook his head frantically.

“Murdock,” MJ said definitively.

Spidey threw himself into his arms on the table.

“What the fuck?” Ned exclaimed, “Is he like, made of secrets or something?”

 “Just fucking kill me,” Spidey moaned.

“What’s in the sinkhole, Parker?” MJ pressed.

“I can’t say; if he doesn’t kill me, one of the others might.”

“Bitch, do I look like I care?” MJ demanded. “I’ve got a week’s worth of labs that need redoing and who the fuck do you think is gonna redo them?”

Spidey groaned.

“I’ll redo your labs,” he offered miserably.

“ _Peter_ ,” the two snapped at the same time.

Angel and Louis and Miles tried to make themselves small without moving. This was some insider shit going on. Louis had a bad feeling about it.

 


	2. 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Yeah, I heard you, just like the other sixteen times, Matt.”

Louis was uncomfortable because Spidey swore all of them to secrecy, on pain of death, in Ned’s living room. He said did it so seriously, there wasn’t room for discussion. And then he apologized; said he didn’t mean to upset anyone, it was just really important that they kept this one secret. Really important.

They needed to talk to a man named Rand, he claimed. Rand had allegedly taken responsibility over the sinkhole. Spidey refused to say exactly what was inside it, but he did imply that whatever it was, was powerful enough to fuck up time and space.

Now that was some comic-book shit.  

So after some borderline strangling on MJ’s part, their little Spidey troop went to go meet the head of Rand Industries.

Because obviously that was the next step here.

“Why does the owner of Rand Industries live in a shitshed?” Angel asked suspiciously, as they stared up at the building. Spidey snorted.

“It’s not a shitshed,” he clarified, then gave her a wide grin, “It’s Double D’s old place.”

Now, that.

That was a shocker.

Louis looked down at the building again. It wasn’t that it wasn’t nice, it had just obviously seen better days. There was dirt scrubbed into the paint and some kind of moss or mold hybrid crawling up its base.

“Uh,” was all he could muster.

“Yeah, Matt never really cared about appearances,” Spidey snickered.

Of course, he didn’t. Duh. Fuck man, come on.

“Why’s Mr. Rand living there now?” Angel asked. Spidey grabbed the back of Miles’s suit and hauled him away from the edge of the building before he could touch the mold-hybrid, which had not confined itself to the base of the building after all, oh no. It had oozed its way into the cracks in the paint all the way up.

“Double D told him he could have it after some shit went down. After it all blew over, he went to live with Foggy and Danny just never left.”

Angel looked down the block.

“Where did Foggy live?”

Spidey reached over and turned her head south, then pointed at an orange building maybe five or six blocks away.

“There. Seventh floor.”

Louis chuckled.

“Not a far move then?”

“Nah. And he’d been sleeping rough for a while, so it wasn’t like he had any shit to move with him. We basically dumped his ass there after the hospital and he never left. Until he left. Whatever, you know what I mean.”

Louis watched Spidey turn back and head towards the stair access structure. He didn’t talk about it much, but Angel had told him that he’d taken it really hard when he’d found out Daredevil had left the city. Like, mega hard.

They had a weird relationship, the two of them. Kind of brotherly, kind of mentor-mentee. The line wasn’t very clear.

He turned around to follow the guy towards the access door he’d taken to pounding on insistently.

The door flew open without any warning, nearly taking Spidey with it. He held his ground and didn’t flinch, though. Angel, who’d been standing behind him, was shell-shocked by the impact, her hands up by her ears mid-flinch. A blond guy with curly hair and a wide collared shirt stuck his head out through the entrance and lit up like a lightbulb upon recognizing Spidey.

“Hey! Spider-kid! Long time no see,” he bubbled. It had to be Rand.

He wandered out and went in for a hug. Spidey gave him one back and he slapped Spidey’s shoulder with a huge white smile. Rand didn’t look like a millionaire. Unless the new fad among millionaires was wearing sweat pants and huge, baggy, cannibalized t-shirts. Louis could just about see the edges of a tattoo on his chest.

“You got so tall! Everyone was saying it, but I was like ‘nah, not that kid, he’s like a beansprout you know?’” Rand was jabbering away to Spidey. Spidey was not pleased by this news.

“Yeah, I noticed. I was there.”

Rand laughed and stood back with his hands on his hips.

“What brings you to this neck of the woods, then? You chasing the Green Gremlin again?”

Spidey remained unimpressed.

“Goblin. He calls himself a goblin, for reasons beyond my comprehension. But no, actually I’m here to talk shop. These guys are with me,” he said, gesturing at the three behind him with his head. Rand’s smile faded. He nodded.

“Yeah, alright. I heard that people were talking,” he turned back into the mouth of the roof access entrance and said, “Come on in.”

 

 

Louis was just gonna out on a limb here and say that it was kind of a blessing that Daredevil ended up moving in with his boo because this place? A fucking monk’s temple. There was no furniture, it was cold as hell, and the place practically echoed. There were a couple mats thrown over the floor here and there, and the space felt huge thanks to the open floor plan, but he couldn’t imagine a blind guy living there safely, especially one who had crazy enhanced senses. The echo was freaking him out and he had kind of shit hearing from his youth playing drums.

Spidey took off his mask, which was a sign for the rest of them to do the same, when Rand offered them tea.

They sat on the floor on a mat in a circle and Louis longed for his beanie. Miles shivered a little and Spidey held out an arm to him to come crawl under. Rand didn’t seem to notice the cold. Once Miles’s pride gave out and he finished tucking himself into Spidey’s side, Spidey leaned forward a bit and started speaking.

“There’s energy coming out of the gate,” he said.

So apparently, they were going for the absurdly cryptic vibe on this one. Alright, Louis could handle that. Rand tilted his chin and widened his eyes slightly.

“Didn’t realize you were part of that circle of knowledge,” he said lightly.

It felt like a threat. It made Louis shiver and Angel edge just a hint closer to Spidey.

“Murdock told me,” Spidey said without wavering. Rand’s eyebrow twitched, but he stayed calm otherwise.

“I guess that’s his right,” he said.

“Mine and some other labs have been getting weird readings lately. Outside interference on our meters; it’s never been this strong before. I’m here to clarify: does the gate have anything to do with it?” Spidey asked.

Rand shifted his shoulders and leaned back on his palms.

“Might. Dunno yet. What’s it to you?”

“I don’t want anything to do with K’un-Lun,” Spidey said out of left field.

The fuck was K’un-Lun? It sounded like a sex thing.

Rand gave Spidey a once over. Then turned and eyed Louis.

“Maybe _you_ don’t,” he said, still to Spidey.

“They don’t know what it is; they’ll have nothing to do with it,” Spidey told him. Rand finally pulled his eyes away from Louis, back to Spidey. Louis shivered again. He saw Miles’s shoulders quiver a bit, too. He’d slipped a hand up against the nape of his neck.

“Swear,” Rand demanded. Spidey took stock of their circle.

“Give us a second.”

Rand nodded and stood, then walked into the kitchen to prepare tea. Spidey waved Angel and Louis in closer.

“Danny is the Immortal Iron Fist, the protector of K’un-Lun,” he explained in a whisper, “It’s a kind of, uh, other dimension. Kind of. Sort of. Some kind of mythical place, look, I don’t entirely get it, and trust me, you don’t want to either. But until he has your word that you won’t fuck with it, he’s not gonna tell us jack about the hole. So when he gets back, you’ve just got to promise him that you won’t touch anything about it with a ten foot pole. Okay?”

They confirmed it. And the fact that Rand was a fucking lunatic. The lunatic returned with tea, however, and thank fuck. Louis hadn’t realized how cold his hands were until he accepted the little cup.

“They’ll swear,” Spidey told him, once he’d set down the tea pot. “But not this one,” he said gesturing with his chin at Miles, “He’s too young to swear, but he can give you his word for now.”

Rand breathed in and then shrugged. Apparently, that was a ‘go on then’ gesture because Spidey looked at Louis and jerked his head expectantly.

Oh shit. Fuck. How do you swear again?

“I swear, I want nothing to do with K’un-Lun,” he said, proud of himself for sounding solemn and only marginally as crazy as the situation. Rand nodded in approval, then looked at Angel. She swore, too. He looked at Miles. Spidey leaned down and whispered something to him.

“I give you my word that I won’t do anything to your, uh, home?”

Rand cracked a smile and chuffed a little laugh. He slapped his hands on his thighs and rubbed them a bit.

“Excellent! Glad that that’s over, now what is it you’re asking about? Parker, right?”

Spidey’s shoulders dropped a little in relief.

“Yeah, Parker. About the gate.”

“Yeah,” Rand mused, rubbing a hand across his stubble, “There’s something inside causing a disturbance, but I can’t seem to get it out. Been trying for damn near a week now. Keep running out of brooms, you know?”

Spidey did not know.

Louis did not know either. Had this idiot been trying to sweep some shit out of a _sinkhole_? Had he missed the part where it was a _sink_ hole?

Spidey frowned.

“Any idea what kind of disturbance?” he asked.

“Ah, I think it’s a seed,” Rand said simply.

Gee, thanks, pal. That cleared nothing up.

“A seed?” Spidey repeated, “What kind of seed?”

Rand shrugged again. His nipple was definitely showing through that shirt. It was distracting. And very, very pert.

Dude, just turn on the heating.

“I’ll know when I get it out. Got a weird feeling about it though. Can’t tell where it came from.”

“Know anyone who might?” Spidey asked.

“I mean, no, not now. I guess we can always mail it to Murdock to lick it or something; might be a good lesson since he’s so fucking happy to go around blabbing about our business.”

Spidey gave a little chuckle.

“If it’s any consolation, he didn’t tell me willingly. Anything we can do to help?”

Rand shook his head.

“Not as far as I know.”

Spidey took this as a sign for them to wrap things up. But before he gave them the signal, he held pulled his phone out of his pocket.

“Can I have your number? I’ll give you mine, so you can text me if something changes.”

 

 

Miles was full on shivering by the time they got out of Hell’s Kitchen. Louis’s hands didn’t want to bend.

“Is he some kind of yeti?” Angel demanded once they hit Carnegie Hall.

“Nah, I think he might just run hot,” Spidey said.

“Do _you_ run hot?” she asked, teeth chattering. Spidey snorted.

“You kidding? I’m always fucking cold, you’ve been to my lab, I’ve got jackets for my jackets.”

Louis remembered no jackets. He vaguely remembered a giant fleece blanket mixed in with the pillows on Spidey’s couch, however.

“Can we wear jackets?” Miles asked sharply. Spidey stopped in his tracks and whipped around to give them all a once-over, and while Louis didn’t know for sure because of the mask, he was pretty sure the guy was dumbfounded.

“Are you guys fucking serious? _Yes._ Christ, yes. What the fuck? Have y’all just been out here with no clothes? What kind of stupid ass shit…” he trailed off irritably, leaving the other three standing out in the cold staring at each other like morons.

“I guess that’s permission?” Angel offered.

 

 

A few days later, Spidey sent out a message on their common chat.

 **SM:** Got a message from Rand. Rendezvous at 11. Usual place.

 **S2** : Got it.

 **S4** : Okay.

Louis didn’t think it was necessary to respond, but there was something about the team spirit there, so he did it anyways.

 **S3:** Alright, see you guys then.

Two hours later, his phone buzzed again from the chat. He checked the messages.

 **DD** : The hell are you talking to danny for? Call me

 

 

They met on the usual rooftop; Louis got there (in his most lightweight winter coat) just in time to catch Spidey desperately trying to end a conversation with Daredevil on the phone.

“Yeah, I heard you, just like the other _sixteen_ times, Matt. Listen, I know what I’m—I am aware that he is an idiot, but you’re the one who—Jesus Christ, old man, he’s not a fucking vampire—I’m not asking Jessica to chaperone. I am a grown-ass man. I am more than capable of--What?”

And so it continued. Louis joined the other two on the ledge. Angel had achieved peak Q-tip by stuffing her enormous white scarf into an equally enormous puffy white jacket. Miles had come prepared with not one, but two sweaters, one with a red hood he’d buried himself in. They said hey and tipped their heads sympathetically at Spidey.

“Sounds like Double D’s freaking out,” Louis noted, watching Spidey, who’d also brought a coat this time, flail at the air around him.

“Are you sure that’s Daredevil?” Miles asked skeptically, “He doesn’t sound very daring.”

“He has selective caring instincts,” Angel informed him.

 “Okay, _okay._ I’ll text Jessica. I’m texting Jessica. I’m opening a message. No, it’s not email, you can’t CC people, Matt. Fuck, you’re so old, sometimes. I’m sending the message to Jessica. The message is sent to Jessica. Are you happy? Great, perfect. Okay, yeah, I won’t. Okay, yeah, I won’t. Matt. I won’t. No, I did not forget and I won’t, oh, look at that, a guy waving a gun around. Looks like a job for Spiderman, gotta go, love you, talk to you later, bye.”

Spidey hung up and then carefully laid down on the ground to scream his frustration into his arms and the roof. Louis felt bad for the guy, he really did. He’d always thought his mom was bad, but she had nothing on old-ass super-people.

They waited until Spidey had gotten all his screams out and had then dusted himself off to rejoin them. He sat down heavily with them on the ledge.

“So, Double D supports us,” Angel observed to break the awkward silence.

Spidey groaned.

“You know, usually, I’d bitch more, but he’s kind of got a history with where we’re about to go,” he admitted.

“A good one?” Miles asked hopefully.

“Uh, no. He might have almost died there a little,” Spidey replied. Which wasn’t actually saying too much; Daredevil almost died a lot. You probably couldn’t spit in Hell’s Kitchen without hitting someplace he’d nearly kicked it.

“A big death or a little one,” Angel asked for reference.

What were their lives now that they dealt in magnitudes of death?

“Probably the biggest one he’s had,” Spidey explained. It gave the rest of them pause.

“And we’re going towards the big death?” Angel clarified.

“Yep.”

“Is there any chance we can go away from the big death?”

“Nope.”

Spidey took the next moment to sit up ramrod straight and dig out his phone to read the message he’d just received. His coat was khaki and way too big for him.

“And that is our cue, ladies and gents,” he announced.

 

 

They went by web to Midtown and clattered down on a roof with plants growing up through its cracks. The dome of the sinkhole’s cover was just within sight. Spidey seemed eager to get there and his tense energy bled out into the rest of them.

Spidey took them across the remaining space in a few huge pendulum swings, the kind he was famous for. From the ground, those things looked easy and graceful, but when you were the one in the swing, that shit was terrifying.

Louis loved them. He felt like he could live forever in the pull to the peak.

He went last, after Angel to make sure they all got across safely, so he was the last to hit concrete at the base of the dome. It was towering and startlingly white. Standing there, you couldn’t see the top. Spidey took them around it, to the back, the part which wasn’t facing any public street. There was just a vacant old parking lot with a chain link fence around it, bearing a sign announcing it had recently been sold for development. Spidey took them to a part of the wall which looked like it had caved in and then rebuilt by hand. There was a steel door attached to it; its hinges shrieked after Spidey put in a code and started to pry it open.

He rushed them inside, then joined them and closed the door.

The place was pitch black. Not even a pinprick of light. Louis’s heart sped up, he could start to feel it in his neck. He’d never really gotten it when people said that darkness was oppressing. He lived in New York. Darkness was a thing which happened only in basements and his ass kept well away from those. But he felt like he understood better, standing there in a huge empty room, breathing in blackness and swallowing silence.

“Get back, step behind you,” Spidey instructed, his voice a welcome noise in the dark. Something wasn’t right; the place didn’t echo like Louis thought it should. It was a dome, it was supposed to collect sound.

“Make sure you’re touching the wall,” Spidey said, “Get your hand on the wall and fucking keep it there.”

They all edged back and Louis held his right hand out behind him until it scraped concrete.

“Everyone got it?” Spidey asked.

They confirmed.

“Alright, follow me, I’m moving forward.”

They followed.

It felt like eternity but couldn’t have been more than a few minutes of walking, when Spidey stopped. Louis bumped against Angel’s back. He could feel her shoulders heaving.

“Okay, this is the hard part,” Spidey told them. “Don’t move just yet. I’m gonna--We’ve got to get down a bit. There should be a platform, and then,” he took a deep breath, “A really deep drop.”

“Holy fuck, Lord Jesus, please don’t take me tonight, ” Angel whined softly to herself.

Yeah, the thought of a drop into the fucking abyss wasn’t exactly giving Louis the warm and fuzzies either.

They heard Spidey take a step forward, then another. He was cataloguing the pattern for them. He took a half step, then corrected. And then another, and another, until the grinding of gravel under his feet stopped. The three of them by the wall waited in silence. Louis had been cold outside, but now he was hot. There was no way in hell he was taking off his jacket, he didn’t want to risk even the slightest movement. They waited, then jumped upon hearing the wail of old metal.

“Oh, thank god,” they heard Spidey breathe. “Okay, guys. I’ve got it. It’s fifteen steeps forward, about a foot each. Then six to the right, and ten ahead. It goes from gravel to metal. I’m standing on a grate. Go one at a time.”

Louis had had an orienteering module in his high school P.E. class, and his group had come third out of six. It was little comfort at that moment because blind orienteering hadn’t been a fucking option. Miles, the bravest little toaster he was, took a big breath and went ahead. Counting as he went. A scrape and a gasp sent Louis’s heart to his throat, but Spidey immediately started soothing and encouraging Miles to keep him grounded and to remind him what number he’d left off on.

The tiny sound of Mile’s feet hitting the grate was such a fucking relief. It made Louis’s knees a little weak. Angel was next.

She took it like she did everything else. As fast as fucking possible. And somehow it worked for her. Her feet hit the grate and there was a quiet celebration over there.

It couldn’t have been more than ten yards away total, and really, ten yards was half a subway car. It wasn’t very far at all. He could do this.

He steadied himself and took the first step, counting out loud so the others could correct him if he missed a step or number. He was doing okay until he hit five to the right. His legs were longer than the rest of theirs. He could feel the place were Miles had slipped by his foot. He breathed deep and felt over that way and found that yes, sir, indeed, it dropped right the fuck off.

“I’m going to go straight now,” he told the others so they didn’t think he was crazy.

He employed the Angel method and got the last steps over in a hurry, and felt his knees shake a little bit when he hit the grate. A myriad of hands grabbed onto him and patted soothingly.

Good lord. Sweet Jesus. Hallelujah, amen.

“There should be a light up here,” Spidey said. The metal they were standing on creaked when he moved around to find it.

Then Louis died.

Or he thought he did anyways. A blinding white light flashed before him and he couldn’t see shit for a second. But after a few blinks, he found that they were standing in the middle of an enormous pit, with an old-fashioned elevator chilling in the middle.

He looked over to Spidey to thank him, but also curse him for the light, only to see that Spidey was spooked. Head darting around the place frantically.

“Who’s there?” he barked into the space.

Oh, fuck, Spidey hadn’t found the light.

“Are you a fucking moron or what?” a bored, flat voice asked. They all whipped back to the edge of the room, and there was a woman with long wavy black hair, standing by a switch wired up to the floodlight above them. She wore a thick black leather jacket with a camera slung over top of it.

Spider bent forward to brace his hands on his knees and breathed a few times to stave off the panic.

“A little warning next time, Jess?” he asked the grate. The lady made a derisive noise and sauntered over to them easily. The path they’d taken was along the very edge of the pit. There was a much wider one just a few feet over. They literally could have just walked straight across.

God _damnit_ , man. Come on.

He’d taken years off his life with that Indiana Jones shit.

“Murdock’s been _freaking_ out,” Jessica Jones said. “He’s called me ten times, Parker. Ten. In an hour. He called me three times when Nelson had cancer. I want you to think about that.”

“I’m thinking about it,” Spidey moaned to his knees.

“And you didn’t call me because?” She asked, observing their rag-tag group of red, blue, and coats. She was oil slick on porcelain. If he hadn’t been busy recovering from his near-death experience, Louis might have called her beautiful, in a strange, cold kind of way.

She met his eyes and then dropped them for Spidey.

“Because?” she repeated.

“Because I’m an idiot,” Spidey answered, “Whatever you want, just for fuck’s sake, don’t ever do that shit again.”

She smirked.

“Were you planning on going down the hard way, too?” She asked.

They all surveyed the drop-off. It looked like there had once been a functional elevator there, but alas, there was no longer. Louis didn’t actually know how Spidey had planned on getting them down, but he wasn’t eager to find out.

“Is there a better way?” Spidey asked.

“Nah, we all just rappel in every time,” she said sarcastically. “Duh. It’s been ten years. Rand put in a better elevator. Come on.”

 

 

The new elevator was fine, it was safe, and it was a whole lot better than falling into the fucking abyss. Jessica Jones shoved her hands in her pockets and looked vindicated through all Spidey’s begrudging apologies and thank yous.

The door opened and she led them out to a room with a cave in the side. An actual cave. With water. And rocks. Even Spidey seemed taken aback.

“And to your left, you’ll see evidence of Murdock’s undying devotion to a sociopath,” Jessica entreated them, leading them through the water without a damn care in the world for her boots. She was, Louis realized, infuriatingly cool. That was what was throwing him off. After Spidey and Cap and Iron Man, he’d decided that all superheroes were secretly goofy nerds, but Jessica Jones was a curveball.

Louis glanced to the right because Angel flinched away from it and sure enough, there was a patch on the edge of the water nearly black with aged, dried blood.

“Oh my god,” he whispered.

Spidey didn’t look at it at all. And that was fair, if that was Louis’s friend’s blood painted all over that rock, he wouldn’t have wanted to see it either.

Jessica took them just a little further down where some idiot was laying on his side, trying to squeeze his hand between a cluster of rocks. The noise of their footsteps alerted him and Rand rolled over to say hey.

“Little hands!” he greeted, “And just in time. I hope you found your way here okay?”

They all glared at Spidey.

“More or less,” he offered. “Did you find the uh, seed?”

Rand was so happy, Louis could only imagine that it physically hurt.

He surged forward to grab Spidey’s arm, but Jessica caught him and shoved him away before he could.

“No touching,” she said, “Red’s orders.”

“Dude,” Spidey said, just as Rand said, “Fucking Red.”

“It was one time,” Rand defended at Jessica. She was unphased and jutted a hip.

“Yeah, one time you threw a blind man off a building.”

“He’s a parkour expert.”

“Parkour doesn’t work in free fall, dumbass.”

“Aw, whatever. He was fine. Luke was down there, he wouldn’t have let anything happen.”

“You mean like a broken femur? Are we no longer classifying that as ‘anything?’”

Rand brushed it off with a dismissive huff and waved at the weird wall behind him. Even Spidey seemed a little warier of him following the exchange. He consulted Jessica’s pissed off face and shook his head.

“You said you thought we could help?”

“Yes, yes, you have chemical web stuff and if all else fails, tiny hands,” Rand said without looking back.

Spidey looked behind him to figure out which of his flock Rand was referring to. Both Angel and Miles immediately stuffed their hands into their pockets. Louis, for once, felt safe.

“I’m not excited about the idea of touching,” Spidey said. “Where’ the thing you’re trying to get.”

It was crammed deep into the hollow of a number of rocks. It was a really pretty little thing actually, a little silvery chestnut shaped ball. You could just barely see the light from Rand’s flashlight bouncing off of it, like a spoon buried in sand.

Rand explained that when it first showed up, he’d had gone off and found a stick to try to fish it out, but it hadn’t come. He’d then carved a little spoon in the top of the stick and tried that way, but still no dice. Then he’d pulled out the big guns and had mutilated a rake, a butterfly net, a pair of bolt cutters, and an even bigger spoon in trying to get the damn thing out.

“I think it’s rooted in there or something,” he pouted, laying flat on his belly and peering into the crevice like a dejected poodle.

“ _I_ think it’s waiting for someone to attach itself to,” Jessica offered from her perch on a pile of rocks to the side. “And I think whoever decides that they’re gonna be the first one to stick their hand in there is gonna end up dead.”

Spidey took this information and laid on his belly and tried to get the ball out with webbing. He had to adjust the angle of the spray a thousand times before he could even get it into the hole, and even then, he couldn’t seem to get it close enough to catch onto the ball itself. Five minutes in, he got frustrated and grabbed Louis, who had made the mistake of being really good with the webbing, and plopped him down in front of the hole in his place.

It was a tricky. He had to adjust the webbing too because it just kept getting snagged on the outside rock. There was a weird root thing blocking the path on the inside as well. Once the spray was adjusted, he managed to get enough web into the hole to get it close to the seed, but it rapidly became apparent that the issue wasn’t with the web, but rather with the ball. The web didn’t stick to it.

This enraged Spidey; he did his damnedest to contain it, but the noise of him taking notes on his phone steadily grew louder and more punctuated. He started wandering around, spraying the web on shit to make sure that he wasn’t crazy, that it really did work on literally every other substance.

“Will the universe implode if I give it a go?” Angel asked.

The web did not work for her, as was to be expected.

Frustrated, she asked Spidey to verify that the suit was hermetically sealed and that skin contact with anything outside of it was unlikely, if not impossible. He scrubbed his hand over his face, then scrubbed the same hand into his hair, then wandered around the cave a little bit, saying sentences which were probably in English to conclude that yes, hypothetically, there was enough suit material between their fingers and the seed that skin contact was not an issue here.

But then he went stiff and got hung up on something about oils and breathable material requiring a certain about of sacrifice in sealing properties, and then re-concluded that no, actually skin contact might be an issue here.

But in terms of being waterproof, the suits were fine, so actually maybe it wasn’t a problem after all.

While he cycled back and forth between these ideas, Angel flopped down, reached in and tried to pluck the damn thing out like an egg.

It took Spidey a second to realize what was happening before he was seizing the back of her suit, hauling her up and demanding to know where the fuck she’d dropped her brain on the way in.

The resulting argument, though entertaining, was not productive.

Louis stopped listening when his head started swimming. He couldn’t see right for a long moment. Shaking it didn’t do anything, nor did closing his eyes. His balance felt weird, like he was leaning way over.

When he opened his eyes again he was, in fact, lying flat on the rock. He sat up and so did Miles next to him, and then Jessica Jones swung her head and hair up out of the water, cursing.

Rand sat up and lost his goddamn mind and declared that everyone needed to get up and out, _now._

But just before they gave in to his suddenly extremely effective herding techniques, Spidey dropped down with his phone to take a picture of his new mortal enemy.

 He went quiet and still for a second, then announced,

“Hey, it’s gone.”

 

 

“What do you mean, a rock?” Daredevil asked over speaker phone at the meeting roof. They were all sitting the edge again, like baby duck in a line. Actually, more like a gang of juvenile delinquent owls. Their coats were doing them no favors in the coolness department.

“You know a ball bearing? Like the balls on that, but less round,” Spidey explained.

There was a pause on the other side of the phone.

“No, yeah, sure, one sec,” Daredevil said. There was a rustle like he was moving, “Hey Fogs, what the fuck is a ball bearing?”

Spidey pressed on of his hands to his forehead in exasperation. They heard a muffled explanation on the other side of the phone followed by a ‘that kind Karen keeps buying you for Christmas. No, the other one.”

“A pendulum,” Daredevil declared back to the phone, proud to have worked this out in his head.

“Sure,” Spidey sighed, “But like, not round. Hard and smooth and metal like that.”

“In the gate?”

“Yeah, just chilling in the rock. We couldn’t get it out. We must have disturbed the deities that be or something because there was some kind of energy wave down there. Bowled us all over. Even Jess.”

“Sounds like trouble,” Daredevil decided. “I vote for not fucking with it.”

“Well, we don’t have any choice,” Spidey said, “It’s gone now.”

Louis flexed his hands and put them in his pockets and looked up at the sky. There were clouds coming in. It smelt like ozone.

“I’ll ask around,” Daredevil said, “But don’t talk to Danny anymore if you can help it. Anything to do with the gate or K’un-Lun is nothing but trouble.”

Says the man who nearly died down there. Louis was willing to take his word for it.

“Alright, thanks, man. I’ll talk to you later,” Spidey said. He ended the call and turned to the rest of them.

“I dunno about you guys, but I still feel like shit. Maybe we ought to call it a day.”

They shared a murmur of agreement and went home.

 

 

 


	3. 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “You get a little too close to the sun there, kiddo?” he asked. Peter breathed miserably in response.
> 
> “Didn’t touch nothing weird, now, did you?” Wade prodded.

It was pouring when Louis woke up. Absolutely pissing down rain. He had to dig his rain jacket out of the back of his closet. He went to go check up on his mom on the way to work and found both her and his auntie staring out the kitchen window, holding mugs of coffee in concern.

When he asked what was up, his mom only said that there was storm coming in.

“It’s already in, Mama,” he told her. She made a tight noise and shook her head a little. His auntie sipped her coffee.

“Be careful at work today,” his mom warned, “The steps are gonna be wet.”

As his mother foretold it, they were drenched and slippery. He almost wanted to go find a sign or something to put next to them, just in case. His supervisor wouldn’t have anything to do with it, though, just wanted Louis to go with him into the next meeting. Possibly to be the token show of diversity, but more likely to sit to his right to make him look better.

And that was the thing about Spiderman, specifically the original Spiderman, now that they were on solid terms.

Peter Parker never once handed out an employee guide book stipulating the appropriate work dress code. In fact, Peter Parker had looked at his first suit and said ‘ehn, good enough,’ and carried on like it was nothing. If Louis needed something all he had to do was ask, and nine times out of ten, Parker would deliver whatever he could to the best of his ability. Even if it was something as simple as an ace bandage. Parker would rather spend his own money than have Louis spend his. Which was sweet, given that Louis was almost positive that he made more money than his rough-and-tumble team leader, despite the poor guy’s extra education and snappy job title.

Furthermore, Parker didn’t ask Louis to read six thousand pages of project reports without explaining what he was looking for, and Parker didn’t constantly forget that Louis’s title was Project Coordinator, not Supervisor’s Personal Assistant. Peter Parker’s Spiderman did not have the time or interest in moving around commas, he wanted to know Louis’s strengths and his weaknesses and what the fuck he wanted to work on, on any given day.

Anarchy and bad attitude aside, that was what really made Spiderman an infinitely better boss than Kyle Pearson.

Louis had not taken out student loans to complete a degree in Yes Sir-ing. It was in Public Admin. And he would really appreciate it if some damn person out there in the world remembered that. Parker had asked once why he wanted to become Spiderman, and he’d babbled something about red tape and Public Administration, instead of the actual answer he’d been dancing around for a while now, which was entirely wrapped up around accessibility.

Spiderman was accessible. Spiderman didn’t have to send a proposal up through the ranks to convince someone, somewhere, that a family deserved to live in a home, not a shelter. If he did send something up, he did it because he cared about what that person had to say.

Spiderman would have let him put a sign on the stairs because not everyone can afford the privilege of anti-slip work shoes, Kyle.

He sat in the meeting, tapping his pen and trying not to be visibly angry. They were looking for more money, always more money. He wanted to know what they’d done with the money they already had. But that was beyond his paygrade; it was his job, Kyle reminded him, to coordinator public outreach, to figure out how people felt about their recent proposals.

How they felt, Louis wanted to say, was cold, wet, and hungry.

He had to stop tapping his pen; it was drawing attention.

 

 

He was still angry when the end of work came, when he joined the daily shuffle down the slippery hallways with his coworkers. They were tired and overworked; they’d go home and watch TV or go get a drink. A few invited him out with them, and he begged off, saying that he was a little too amped from the meeting that day to be good company that night.

They knew what he meant.

They waved him goodbye as he threw up his hood and loosened his tie on his way to the subway.

 

 

Angel worked hard and it sometimes peaked out from behind her mischievous mask, especially when it was just her and Louis as Spiderman. Spidey hadn’t put out the call, but sometimes they both gravitated to the meeting roof for a little bit of peace.

She was there when he got there, her hood up as well, sagging a little in the downpour.

He walked up next to her; jostled her shoulder a little bit. She gave him a tight smile and a nudge back.

“Feels weird, doesn’t it?” she said.

“Yeah, felt that way for a while,” he agreed.

“Hate the tie,” she noted.

“Yeah, me too.”

“Louis, I’m worried. It’s a really bad feeling.”

Her pink jacket looked more purple in the blue light. He looked up at the sky, but it was just waves of grey and rain catching on streetlights.

“Maybe we need to have a serious talk with Peter,” he said.

 

 

Spidey, or Peter, as they’d eventually found themselves calling the off-duty version of him, answered his door pale as a ghost.

He and Miles had the same tendency to clutch at their necks when weird shit was happening. He took in their faces and pushed his door open wider, wordlessly inviting them in.

They all sat in silence in the small living room with rain streaking down the windows. Peter was the kind of guy who didn’t turn on his lights until he absolutely had to. He was a hybrid of scientist and environmentalist, but in a weird way. He kept his lights off and small piles of polished stones on his window sills, none of which he acknowledged in their presence. There had been stones on his office desk, too. He kept candles around his house and steadfastly refused to use plastic bags.

Angel thought he was maybe a kind of new-age hippie, but there was something about the way the rocks were clustered that made Louis think that it might be more than that.

He didn’t know why it was so hard for him to reconcile the fact that Peter could be Spiderman, Lab Manager, and Urban Witch all at the same time, but it was.

The reflection of the stones in the window, water skating down the glass behind them, was soothing, but the effect seemed lost on Peter. His knuckles and face were white and he seemed to be swallowing more often than was normal.

“You okay?” Angel asked him quietly, “You don’t look so good.”

He tried to nod. But it was more of a confirmation that something was wrong than everything was fine.

Louis stood up and grabbed a trashcan. He set it next to the guy just in time.

“Jesus Christ,” Angel muttered while he gagged and retched. “Do you want us to call someone?”

Peter shoved a hand to his forehead, pressing there and trying to catch his breath.

Louis immediately knew it was something to do with the silver ball. It wasn’t a question of what or how, it was only a question of why him?

Peter drew his phone out of his pocket and handed it shakily to Angel.

“Can you call my aunt?” he asked, just barely keeping himself from gagging and starting the whole process all over again. “She’s a nurse, I’ll just ask her…something. I’ll just ask her what to do.”

You don’t need a nurse, friend. You’ve got a curse.

Louis reached out and took the phone.

“I’ve got a better idea,” he said.

 

 

Wade Wilson was a terrifying behemoth of a man, but he was stunningly gentle with Spidey for reasons that Louis could only guess at. He came in, unbothered by the water running off his suit, and crouched down to take in Peter’s paleness and general suffering. He took his wrist and rubbed a thumb in circles there.

“You get a little too close to the sun there, kiddo?” he asked. Peter breathed miserably in response.

“Didn’t touch nothing weird, now, did you?” Wade prodded.

“You talked to Double D?” Peter asked.

Wade put his wrist down.

“Yeah, he’s pretty far gone on it, too. He’s about ready to send for the priest.”

Peter looked up, confused.

“What do you mean?”

Wade moved the trashcan and slid an arm around him to help him up out of the slump. He waited until Peter grabbed at his arms to sit up before answering.

“That thing you told Red about, over the phone? You said it was some kind of metal ball thing, right?”

“Yeah,” Peter said. Wade pulled him all the way up to sitting and then sat down cross-legged across from him. He reached over and grabbed the trashcan to replace in his hands.

“It showed up at Red’s place in SF.”

 

 

Wade put Peter to bed once he’d run out of bile to vomit and productive anxiety to have and told the other two that he’d stay with him in the apartment for the night. Angel wrung her hands and tried to keep herself steady.

“I’m the one who got closest to it,” she said.

“Not anymore,” Wade told her, faux-cheerfully.

Fuck.

Daredevil wouldn’t have been able to tell that it was what it was without touching it. God, talk about playing dirty.

“Is he okay?” Angel asked hesitantly.

“Nah, he’s pretty fucked up too,” Wade said, “Nelson’s looking after him, though, don’t worry too much, Nelson is secretly the brains of their operation. He has, allegedly, ‘isolated the variable.’ Which I think means put the whatever it is in tupper-ware. He doesn’t know what he’s doing, that one, but he’s sure got the spirit, you know?”

Yeah, Louis thought maybe he did know. All the same, he wondered what it was like to wake up one day and be told that your partner was a vigilante with superpowers. Specifically, a vigilante with rage issues. What did that do to a relationship? It wasn’t exactly the same thing as erectile dysfunction or an eating disorder; it wasn’t enough just to ‘be there’ or help them get help, was it?

He wondered if he’d ever tell his mom what he did. What she’d say. How she’d react.

Angel sighed and swallowed and twisted her hands in her jacket, then dropped her head and asked, “Wade, how do we fix this?”

Wade leaned back against the counter in Peter’s kitchen and folded his arms.

“Might not be our problem to fix, little one,” he said.

“So we’re just supposed to leave it?” Louis asked.

Wade weighed the options with his head, then shrugged.

“For now? Yeah. What else are you gonna do? You know something the rest of us don’t? Got some guy we can beat the snot out of? A magic potion? Maybe one of them crystal balls that tell you ‘bout the bad guy’s shitty home decorating?”

Louis shut up.

“Yeah, that’s what I thought,” Wade watched the rain against the window for a long moment. The rocks on the sill looked very cold. Louis wasn’t sure what he wanted to do, but it didn’t feel right to just go home and leave Spidey where he was, as he was. Even with Wade looking after him. Especially if, across the country, Daredevil was experiencing the same thing, having touched a goddamn teleporting cursed object. Like, it just didn’t seem right.

“If you really want something to do,” Wade said into the soft pattering of rain between them all, “You might go check in on your little buddy and see where he’s at. Make sure he’s not sick like the other two.”

“And then?” Angel pressed, just a hint desperately.

Wade moved his crossed arms uncomfortably.

“Then, maybe you can talk to Rand.”

 

 

Miles answered the door himself after they’d slogged through the downpour in Brooklyn. He took them around the building he lived in, to an alley covered by an awning, so that they could talk without people getting suspicious.

He listened to their explanations of what was going on with Peter with doe eyes that got more serious the longer the explanation went on.

“Mine’s still just a hum,” he said, referring to his Spidey Sense. “It hasn’t gotten any worse since we left that place.”

None of them really wanted to go back for the suits, so they all tromped down through the rain to catch the train to Manhattan.

 

 

They hadn’t factored in the fact that they only knew how to get to Danny Rand’s place by rooftop. The rain made getting up to roof level shitty fucking business; it ended up involving creative use of Miles’s sticky hands and feet and a whole lot of team work.

Things they know knew: Angel was less good at most things wet. Miles’s stickiness was decreased slightly by things being wet. Louis was far more flexible than he thought.

Rand opened the door before they even knocked and stared at them in the entrance of it with a weariness quite different from his previous bubbling.

“Spidey’s really sick,” Angel told him through the rain.

“I know,” he said. He was wearing a long-sleeved shirt this time.

“Daredevil’s sick, too,” Louis stated. Rand moved aside in the doorway and gestured for them to come inside.

 

 

It was warm inside for a change, there were several candles lit and incense was burning. Rand invited them to leave their coats by the door and have a seat while he made tea. They were waiting for him when the front door rattled open and a girl with pale skin and long dark hair came in. She gasped in surprise upon noticing their presence with a hand over her heart.

“These are Spiderman’s associates,” Rand explained to her.

“Spiderman has associates?” she asked.

“They’re here because he’s gone down, too,” he said.

She had a round face and dark eyes and, now that Louis was properly looking, a scabbard on her shoulder. It looked like one of Wade’s, but white.

“This is Colleen,” Rand introduced, “She’s my close friend and confidant—”

“Girlfriend,” Colleen corrected.  “And close friend and confidant. I’m sorry to hear about Spidey. Matt was, uh.”

“Furious?” Rand offered. “A little rage-y?”

“ _Upset_ that he got involved the other day,” Colleen continued without acknowledging Rand. “We shouldn’t have reached out to him to get you guys involved, that was our mistake. Please accept our apologies.”

Rand didn’t look very apologetic.

Colleen noticed the three of them looking at him and gave him a meaningful jaw clench.

“Ah, right. Yes, our most sincere apologies. We didn’t know it would latch onto someone like that,” Rand said. “Especially since it should have latched onto me, if anyone.”

Colleen rolled her eyes. Louis wondered what that was about. But then again, if he remembered correctly, this was the same guy who’d stuck his bare hand down that hole trying to grab the thing. Planning evidently wasn’t his forte.

“What is it?” Miles asked, cradling his tiny cup of tea when it was handed to him. “Is there anything we can do to help turn it off or something?”

Colleen and Rand sat down with them on the rug. Rand rubbed a thumb over the rim of his teacup. Colleen held hers delicately.

“We’re in the process of finding out more, so we don’t know for certain yet, but it seems like whatever it is, is looking for a new source of energy to sap. It was taking it from the bones, but they aren’t putting off enough right now to keep it down there,” Colleen told them.

“Bones?” Miles repeated on behalf of their trio.

“Dragon bones,” Rand said. Then choked from the slap Colleen laid on his back. She gave him another Meaningful Look and he held up his hands apologetically.

“Magic bones?” He tried to amend.

She put her head in her hands. Well, so much for the secret. No wonder Spidey had been so squirrely about the whole thing. You start talking about fucking magic dragon bones and people are gonna start looking at you like you’ve lost it.

“Why did it latch onto Daredevil then?” Miles pointed out, bringing them back to base like a champ, “He wasn’t even there with us.”

“Yeah he was,” Rand countered, “If the info Jessica beat out of our guy is true, that thing’s probably been feeding on his dead blood down there for more than minute. It might have seen Spidey as a way to get to the living kind.”

“Across a continent?” Miles asked, skeptically.

Rand held up his hands again.

“I’m not making the rules, here, man.”

“How do we kill it, then?” Angel asked. Louis held back a smile at the determination in her brow.

Colleen and Rand looked at each other and then over to the window. Then they looked back to the three of them.

“You got half an hour?” Colleen asked.

 

 

They watched Jessica Jones stomp on the guy’s ribs in horror, then watched in frozen terror as she hauled him up by his collar and slammed him against the chain-link fence behind him. Water showered down as it rattled.

“You gonna talk?” Jessica asked with barely contained fury in her throat.

The guy started sobbing. He shook his head ‘no.’

“Your funeral, pal,” she ground out. Then took her fist back.

“He’s. My. Fucking. Friend.”

 She punctuated each word with a blow. Angel covered her mouth. Miles shivered just behind Louis’s right arm. Louis felt the urge to step further in front of him, even though he knew Jessica had no reason to turn those fists on them.

“And I’ll be _damned_ before I let him die from this. Stupid. Shit,” Jessica snarled at the form she’d dropped on the pavement.

She picked him up again.

He decided he wanted to talk this time.

 

 


	4. 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Hi, this is Miles, I’m Spiderman 3, are you Mr. Daredevil’s husband?” he asked. Louis and Angel looked around them frantically to make sure no one was listening in. Stealth was not this child’s forte.

The little ball was, in fact, a seed of types. And it had, in fact, been feeding off the magic dragon bone energy down in the pit.

The man, an occultist, kept blubbering about how he and his buddies hadn’t meant to summon such a thing. They hadn’t realized that it could do such damage to people. They hadn’t realized that anything had happened at all, actually, since the seed hadn’t shown up in their ritual space.

Rand had to restrain Jessica from strangling the man’s witchy ass multiple times, intent as she was on burning him at the stake after she’d drained all the blood from his body. Louis hoped Daredevil knew how much she cared about him. Maybe he did; Louis didn’t know how super-people did anything, besides that they were incapable of doing it normally.

“FIX IT,” Jessica demanded of the occultist, who immediately burst into fresh sobs because he didn’t know how.

“Find out,” Jessica ordered. She then crossed the room and slammed the door behind her so hard, Louis was shocked that it stayed on its hinges.

 

 

The Spidey trio went to go check on their brave leader, with assurances from Rand and Colleen that as soon as they knew more, they’d give them a call.

When they got back to the apartment, Wade answered the door and moved all the pillows off the living room couch so that they could all sit while they told him what they’d learned.

“Fucking witches,” Angel swore, “All they do is buy sage and bring demons back from the dead.”

Wade smiled a little as he leaned forward on his knees.

“Wouldn’t say that if I were you,” he told her.

Louis saw the switch click in her head when she realized that the little collections of stones on the window sill were more than just aesthetic. Miles didn’t get it. He followed Angel’s eyes to the stones, then turned to Wade for clarification.

“Pete’s aunt is a little witchy,” he said for their collective edification, “He grew up with it. It’s important to him. It’s a load of horseshit, if you ask me, but you don’t see me spitting on crosses either,” he smiled to himself, “On the regular, anyways.”

“How is he?” Angel asked guiltily. Wade turned his head a little towards the door, then shrugged.

“Still unconscious, which is about where we want him. Called to check in on Red, and I’m proud to announce we got twins. Anyways, y’all should go home. Sleep a little. You’re looking a little mean.”

Louis thought that that might have been the worry Wade was picking up on, not anger. He had a point, though. The world moved on even when Spiderman was down. They needed to rest, then regroup. He promised to give Wade a ring if they learned anything else and they agreed to drop by the following night to check-in. Then they split off for home.

 

 

Wade messaged them to tell them not to come over the next night and Louis’s stomach dropped in the breakroom at work. That was either very bad or very good. Very good because Spidey might have recovered enough to not need a check-in. Very bad because he might have deteriorated such that Wade didn’t want them to witness it.

He had a feeling it was the latter. He hid in the bathroom and called Angel who told him that she was going over there anyways; he agreed to meet her a bit early at 9. About an hour later, Miles called him to apologize that he was going to go against Wade’s orders.

They were a fucking train wreck in terms of command, weren’t they?

Miles said he’d meet them at 9.

They met in street clothes on the roof and tried to figure out their next course of action. There had been no word from Rand.

They were stumped. Couldn’t move forwards or backwards.

“What if he dies?” Angel asked. She sounded like she was about to cry.

“No, girl. He’s not gonna die,” Louis told her, moving close to rub her upper arms comfortingly. “He’s gonna be fine.”

“We’re only level twos,” she hiccupped, “We can’t replace him. What are we gonna do?”

“He’s gonna be fine,” Louis promised her, unsure whether he was telling her or himself.

They collected themselves enough to go to the apartment.

 

 

“I told you no,” Wade stated. He put himself between them and the door like a brick wall. He wasn’t about to move. Especially if it meant protecting Spidey, or Peter. Louis wasn’t so sure which one he was at that moment.

“Wade, we just want to see him; just so we can sleep tonight,” Louis pleaded. Wade was resolute.

Angel fixed that by bursting into tears.

“Oh honey, no, don’t do that,” he begged, trying and failing to keep up the stone guardian act. Angel would not be deterred. She had a whole lot of anxiety and stress balled up there in her chest. She shoved away his soothing hands and tried to muffle the noise she was making with her jacket arms.

“No, no, no,” Wade crooned gently. “Come on, it’s not like that, Little Spidey. It’s just gonna upset you more if you see him and it’s just getting a little much, like, I just called his aunt and she’s gonna come over and freak the fuck out in twenty minutes and you guys don’t really want to be here to witness that. Hell, _I_ don’t want to be here to witness that.”

Angel blew out some breaths to try to calm down; when she pulled her arms away from her face her eyes were puffy and her brow furrowed.

“Is this my fault?” she asked with wet, clumped up lashes, “’Cause I touched the thing?”

Wade literally could not deal with the question. Either because he didn’t have enough context or because he did not have the emotional capacity to work through the mess it presented. Louis could almost hear the dial-up tone screeching through his head. He was saved however, by a thud behind the door and Peter’s thin voice calling for him.

He squirmed in visible anguish for a second, torn between priorities, and then threw his hands up.

“Alright, what the fuck ever. Come in, just don’t talk to him.”

He opened the door and immediately ducked into the bedroom off the side. Louis shooed the other two in first and then closed the door behind him so the neighbors didn’t start kicking up a fuss.

Around the corner in the bedroom, Peter appeared to have fallen out of bed. He was bleary and confused, tangled in the bedsheets. He started shoving back at Wade’s hands telling him ‘no’ and ‘stop,’ as he tried to help him.

“What’s happening?” he slurred, just as the trio got to the entrance. He’d gone from pale and clammy to pale and feverish in the time they’d been gone.

“You’re cursed, baby boy,” Wade told him, circumventing the shoving arms by grabbing him around the ribs and hauling him back onto the bed.

“Cursed?” Peter asked. He didn’t seem all there; when Wade pushed him back, he pressed forward into the hand defiantly.

“Pete, lay down.”

“No.”

“Pete, I don’t wanna hurt you.”

“What’s happening?”

“I told you, you’re cursed.”

“Cursed?”

“Yeah, cursed. C’mon, kid. Lay down.”

He followed the order halfway, then caught himself on his elbows and started searching the room.

“Wade? What’s happening?”

He sounded desperate and so, so lost.

“Don’t worry about, baby boy. Just go to sleep,” Wade told him, grabbing his forearms to pull his elbows out from under him. Peter eased back, still uncertain. Then he reached out and grabbed one of Wade’s forearms to keep him from drawing back completely.

“Wade?” he asked.

“I’m right here.”

“’Wade?” he asked, just on the edge of hysterics.

Wade leaned forward and pressed their foreheads together. He lifted his head a little and peeled off his mask, then pressed them back together, murmuring to Peter softly.

Louis tried to contain his shock, but he couldn’t take back the initial recoil.

Wade was.

Wade was.

He’d heard, of course, that Deadpool was fucked up. That Deadpool was some kind of mutant who regenerated his body. He’d even seen it in action. But he hadn’t seen Wade’s face. It was gnarled and blistered and scarred. Cratered in places like the moon. He’d have thought it was a rubber Halloween mask in any other context. But the way Peter was pressing his thumbs and fingers into the scars and slowly getting calmer, coming back to himself, robbed Louis of the fantasy. No, that was just how Wade was. That was the Wade Peter knew, the one he remembered, and one he apparently trusted with his life.

“There you go, kiddo, nice and easy.” Wade carefully lowered Peter until he was laying all the way down. When he pushed himself up off the bed, Peter had already dropped off back into unconsciousness. Wade took a slow breath, then pulled his mask over his face again. For their benefit, Louis realized. He rubbed his hands on his thighs and then addressed the three of them in the doorway.

“So, this is about as bad as it looks,” he told them.

 

 

“There _has_ to be something we can do,” Miles insisted out in the cold air on the walk home.

Wade made them leave before Peter’s aunt came. He said them staying wasn’t going to do anyone any good. Peter woke up again while they were there; he settled down when Wade let him have his ungloved hand to hold. It was uncomfortably intimate. Something Louis felt he hadn’t earned the right to witness. To understand.

It wasn’t even sexual, that kind of guilt he was used to, it was worse. It was the fragility, the reliance, not only the desire, but the need to lean on someone else to maintain stability.

Peter wasn’t an old guy, he was maybe a year older than Louis, at most a year and a half. He’d lived more life than his three juniors combined, however. And it was difficult keep those two things overlapping in his head. To see him falling into the behavior of a normal, seriously ill, 25-year-old felt wrong in a way which made Louis feel even more guilty. It was almost like somewhere in his head, Peter hadn’t been allowed to get hurt or sick.

It wasn’t disappointment he was feeling. It was fear.

“Where did that thing go?” Miles asked. It made Louis stop and turn back to look at him. Angel followed his lead with her sore eyes.

“What?” she croaked.

“Where did it go?” Miles repeated, “That thing. Does Daredevil still have it?”

“I dunno,” Louis said, “It sounds like he might.”

“Do you have his number?” Miles asked, determination in his brow. Louis was taken aback. Miles was usually pretty reserved and even a little skittish around them, even after a few months of being on their team. The only person he seemed really comfortable with was Angel.

“I don’t,” Louis told him, “We’ve only got him on the chat.”

Miles dug out his phone and brought up the chat. He tapped around a bit and somehow found Daredevil’s number. He dialed there in the street and waited, breath puffing out in clouds. The phone rang, but there was no answer.

He dialed again.

Then again.

And again.

He shrugged Louis’s hands off his shoulders when Louis tried to move him towards the train station and scowled at him.

He dialed again.

And again.

And

“Hello?” answered a soft tinny voice on the other side of the line.

What the fuck, that was Foggy.

“Hi, this is Miles, I’m Spiderman 3, are you Mr. Daredevil’s husband?” he asked. Louis and Angel looked around them frantically to make sure no one was listening in. Stealth was not this child’s forte. And that was not helped by whatever strong emotion he appeared to be feeling. Thankfully, it was late enough and wet enough that they were alone.

Foggy didn’t sound half as relaxed as the last time Louis had seen him, yet somehow, he maintained his composure in the face of this brash introduction.

“Hi, Miles. Yes, that’s me. You can call me Foggy. It seems like you really wanted to get ahold of Matt; I’m sorry, he’s not really well at the moment. Is there something I can help you with?”

“Yes, sir. Do you still have the thing that made him sick?” Miles asked, blunt as a bat.

There was a pause on the other side of the line.

“Why do you want to know?” Foggy asked in the tone of a man who’d been burned before.

“Because we need to study it if we want to fix this, and we can’t study it without having it in front of us,” Miles explained.

And you couldn’t really argue there; it was better than anything the rest of them could come up with.

“Miles, how old are you?” Foggy asked. Miles didn’t waver.

“I’m fourteen.”

“Okay, bud. So you understand that I’m not excited about a minor getting his hands on that thing, right? I don’t want you to get sick like the others.”

“I understand, Mr. Daredevil, but I’m not a normal fourteen-year-old.”

Louis couldn’t help but smile a little at ‘Mr. Daredevil;’ he could imagine Foggy smiling, too.

“Not normal,” Foggy repeated.

“You knew Peter when he was my age, right?” Miles asked “And you trusted him, right? Or Daredevil did, at least. If you trusted him, you can trust me. I’m Spiderman, too.”

There was a long pause on the other side. Miles puffed out a few clouds of steam, a line of tension in his neck.

“You make a good argument, Miles,” Foggy said patiently, “And I am low options, so I’m going to trust you.” Miles fist-pumped silently. “I’ve already spoken to Danny and the others about this; the pod disappeared about an hour after Matt touched it. I took a picture and some video of it. I’ll send it along. Jessica’s gotten some more information on it and it’s not looking good. They don’t want to tell you guys because they’re worried you might get involved.”

None of them had been expecting that. Louis kicked himself for having been so naïve. Wade must have known that they weren’t going to tell them. That was why he’d been trying to put distance between them.

“But you’ll tell us?” Miles breathed hopefully into the phone.

Another long pause.

“Yes, I think I will. Because I think you might be just the guy for the job, Miles.”

 

 

The seed pod, as Foggy called it, was allegedly a little parasite that flitted in and out of space and time, following what the occultist called ‘energy trails.’ In the past, they’d been associated with fairies and alchemy because, if caught, they could be broken down into a powder which looked a lot like silver. This was exciting to people in the past because it was easy to use to illuminate books.

The occultist didn’t know if the pod was actually some kind of alien or if it was the sentient result of a kind of human activity. What he did know was that it was very selective of its hosts. It had become acquainted with Daredevil’s blood in the cave, where it had followed the energy of the thing Rand was guarding. Then Spidey rolled up, alive and practically radiating abnormality, something had triggered the parasite to want to follow him, which the guy thought could be anything from his ‘aura’ to it sharing some kind of biological similarity with Spidey’s mutation. It might have gone after Daredevil for a similar reason, or simply because it found something of his at Spidey’s place and was reminded of its affinity.

Louis thought that that sounded like crazy people talk, but he was rapidly realizing that he now lived in the actual world of superheroes and this was the kind of bonkers shit they had to deal with.

“So you can break it down,” Miles confirmed over the phone.

“From what I understand,” Foggy told him.

“We just have to get ahold of it, then,” Miles said. “Okay, how do we do that?”

“I’m not sure,” Foggy admitted. “But I’m fairly certain that step one is finding out where it went.”

So that’s where they decided to start.

 

 

Rand and company were not guilty to have kept the information from them. If anything, they seemed peeved that Foggy had gone around their orders, which, tough shit, y’all. Foggy didn’t pledge allegiance to any of your asses.

Colleen relented first and said they were working on a way to track the thing, but they couldn’t quite make it work. She revealed that they’d found a dead pod and produced said pod in a little box. Some of it had been crushed into a powder, but there was enough of the outer shell still there that they could tell it was the same shape. There was a little seed inside, about the size of a sunflower kernel, which Colleen explained, had a bit of a magnetic pull to other pods.

She said they just needed to find someone who could do the math to figure out the logic behind the pull so that they could figure out how to track the other pod.

Miles lit up and announced for the first time ever, “I’m really good at math.”

Louis was skeptical that he was good enough at math to do what needed to be done, but the person who was probably their best bet was currently a little busy dying. He looked up and saw that everyone else seemed to have similar ideas.

They decided what the hell.

 

 

Miles was absurdly good at math for a fourteen-year-old, but not quite good enough to unpick whatever code was there. He got upset and frustrated. Angel took him aside and talked to him for a little while and he came back a little more at ease and with fresh determination.

He stared at the work on the table then turned back to Louis and announced,

“I wanna go see Spidey again.”

As if Louis was the one in charge of making that call. Everyone else was justifiably confused as fuck, too.

“I don’t think you want to do that, kid,” Jessica told him cautiously.

“I do,” Miles insisted. He stacked his papers and started shoving them in his bag. Jessica met Colleen’s eyes over his head.

“I’m gonna rephrase that,” she said, “I’m not sure Deadpool is gonna let you do that.”

“He will,” Miles informed her with more confidence than anyone else in the room. Then he threw his backpack on and stomped out into the night like he didn’t give a shit about what anyone else thought.

They couldn’t exactly sanction a minor roaming the streets on Defenders business at 2 in the morning, so the others gave Louis and Angel the go ahead to go with him and report back on what he found.

Miles took them all the way back to Queens, where he started sagging a little out of tiredness. He shook himself once he came up from the train station and balled his fists before stalking off in the direction of Spidey’s apartment, uncaring whether Louis and Angel were following or not. Louis thought maybe he was more tired and stressed than he’d thought to be following a kid all the way across the city, not once, but twice in one night.

He and Angel had decided that if Wade said no, they’d just drag Miles home kicking and screaming, put him to bed, and tell him to leave it to the Defenders.

But Miles was a force of nature in his own right, little baby Spidey powers and all. He knocked on Peter’s door, ducked under Wade’s arm, and somehow finessed his way around Peter’s aunt (who was lovely and rightfully stressed right the fuck out about her nephew’s sudden illness). He shook Peter’s arm until the guy woke up, despite Wade and Peter’s aunt’s ‘child, don’t fucking do that’ noises. Wade looked about ten seconds from scooping him up and dumping his tiny ass out onto the pavement. Louis jumped in to explain to the two what exactly was going on before Wade put this plan into action.

“Peter, can you help me?” Miles asked their confused, muzzy leader while the adults behind him squabbled.

Spidey apparently had a Pavlovian reaction to the word ‘help.’ He jerked his head towards Miles and blearily accepted the papers he was holding out to him. This was enough to nudge Wade and Peter’s aunt out of irritation/protection territory and into surprise.

“I can’t solve this equation,” Miles said, pointing at the paper. He read out the math to Peter because it seemed like he couldn’t see it very well.

“Why the fuck are you solving for velocity?” was Peter’s slurred opinion on this.

Louis thought the guy deserved a Nobel prize of some type to be able to do math in the state he was in. He drifted for a second, then mumbled something which turned out to be a request for a calculator. He then drifted a bit again, before remembering that he was holding paper. Then he wanted Wade to tell him what was happening.

“You’re _helping_ me,” Miles said insistently, now fully aware of the reaction that word invoked, “See? I’m trying to solve this equation.” He pointed to the new one Peter had written out.

“Then why the fuck are you solving for mass?” Peter grumbled and carried on correcting whatever idiot Peter had been doing previously.

This went on, to all the adults’ bafflement, for six rounds until Peter flopped back and shoved the paper at Miles slurring, “See? Easy.”

“So easy,” Miles agreed, accepting the papers and holding them carefully to his chest. “Thanks, Spidey.”

Peter threw out a hand and sloppily ruffled Miles’s hair and then promptly passed the fuck out.

Miles turned to them with a huge fucking grin. And Louis had to admit, the kid got shit done.

 

 

Louis half-dragged Miles home because it was far too late and suspicious for a kid to be out for so long, and by the time he got back it was damn near sunrise. He called in sick and collapsed on his bed and tried not to get too hopeful that whatever nonsense math Peter had produced was plausible enough to get them going on the right path.

He could feel anxiety burrowing into his chest, in the space just between his lungs. It felt a little like heartburn.


	5. 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Yeah, and now he’s terrified, and now he’s going to tell Daredevil that three copy-cats are trying to kill him,” Louis pointed out. “We have to be the good guys here, Angel. We can’t go chasing him like that.”

They had two normal days in between the completion of the equation and the Defenders’ next phone call and Louis only just managed not to sprint to the bathroom to answer it.

He didn’t know how he’d been elected leader of the Spidey team in Spidey’s absence, he thought maybe it was because he was the tallest.

Colleen told him to gather everyone and come to the dome at 9. To bring a bag with their suits and whatever else they thought they might need. She said they’d found the other pod, but they it wasn’t going to be easy to retrieve.

Angel and Miles celebrated the news over text.

Louis grinned but couldn’t shake the little creature nesting in his chest.

 

 

“Okay, so bear with me,” Colleen said with enormous trepidation in the middle of the rocks and water down in the pit. She seemed more than a little nervous and kept bumping her elbow against her sword, probably because Wade had joined their trio unexpectedly and was looming over all of them in the back with crossed arms. Louis wondered if the Defenders were wary because they knew Wade’s behavior was normally all over the place and the stoicism signaled a meaningful change, or if this was how Deadpool came off to most people: a hulking red and black terror.

Louis also wondered if Wade knew he’d have equal luck scaring the shit out of people with his face unmasked. He had to. Why the mask then? What did that accomplish?

“The living seed pod is sitting somewhere on 57th street, between 3rd and 6th,” Colleen said. She held out a phone. It had a complicated map on it that looked like the fucking train system. The three of them examined the phone and then looked up at her blankly.

“This is tracing it,” she said, shaking it at them a little. Angel reached out and took it so she’d stop.

“How?” she asked.

“Jessica knows a guy who knows a guy who owes her a favor,” Colleen explained, “He made it for us.”

Jessica snorted behind them.

Louis tried to stamp down the question of how many fingers the guy had had when he’d been put to work.

“What are we supposed to do with this?” Angel asked, “Can’t we just go to Midtown with, I dunno, a flashlight. Bait? Some of Spidey’s blood or something?”

What, they were treating it like a cat now? Some kind of sentient, parasitic stray?

Colleen clenched her jaw and consulted the people behind her anxiously. Wade tilted his head to encourage her to go on. She wasn’t encouraged, but she was really brave. She pointed at the phone.

“Look at the time signature in the corner,” she said. They crowded around Angel to see.

That was.

That.

That couldn’t be right.

“Oh, that’s exciting,” Wade rumbled, sounding a bit more like his usual self.

Louis hated it. Immediately. Without reservation.

“This is ten years ago,” Angel pointed out, just in case anyone had missed it.

Colleen pursed her lips and nodded tightly. The others didn’t say anything to help.

“Ten years ago,” Angel repeated.

“I _love_ the ones that time travel,” Wade bubbled. Louis had never wanted anything more in the world than for him to shut the _fuck up._

“We cannot time travel,” Angel pointed out for everyone’s edification.

“Not with that attitude,” Wade chirped.

She rounded on him with a scary glint to her eye, then whipped back to the others. He wiggled in excitement.

“How the fuck are we supposed to find it if we can’t time travel?” she spat at the others.

“I think I can help with that,” Rand suddenly spoke up.

No, he couldn’t. Louis didn’t want him to; therefore, he couldn’t.

Rand waved at the gate behind him.

“Did some reading, found something which should work. Just need to do it here so I can get enough qi.”

Oh god, this was happening.

Rand dug a handful of beads out of his pocket and held them out to their group. There were only three bracelets, each made of smooth black beads. They were heavy and cold with the tiniest metallic sheen to them. Louis wanted to throw his into the little river around them.

“We got these from the witch,” Rand explained, “Verified them with Jessica’s pagan; they’re made out of the same stuff as the parasite, they should help you move in and out without you know, fucking everything in the entire world up. But they won’t last for long.”

Louis wanted out of this fucking comic book.

Why was everyone taking this so seriously. Why did Wade sound like he’d done this before?

“All you’ve got to do is go through the gate I’m going to make for you, find the pod, and then bring it back,” Rand said nice and easy. Because he wasn’t the one about to drop into the fucking abyss that was the space-time continuum. Why had _they_ been the ones chosen for this? Surely this was a job for Wade. Or Jessica Jones. Or anyone with any sort of relevant experience.

“Don’t you think that we’re maybe, not the right guys for this?” he asked.

The others were visibly taken aback, a few even recoiled.

“You guys are like at least level threes,” Rand said, “It’s nothing you can’t handle.”

Oh, good. There was a scale after all.

Louis gestured at Wade a little desperately. He watched him with interest.

“Can’t he go?” Louis asked. Rand evaluated Deadpool.

“Nah, I think that might be cutting it close,” he said. Wade pouted. “Deadpool was pretty active back then, so the chances of him running into himself are pretty high.”

“I’m cursed with a strong gravitational pull,” Wade told them dolefully.

What the fuck did that even mean?

“So what, we’re fine because we were all nobodies ten years back?” Louis clarified.

The silence that greeted him was nonjudgmental but affirming.

“So what’s gonna happen is I’m going to try to open a gate and if this works, you’re going to go through it and find the pod, which will probably be chasing after the other Spidey or Murdock’s scent. So, you go grab it, wearing the beads--only with the hand wearing the beads--and then bring it back. We’ll smash it and hopefully that’s be the end of this nonsense,” Rand told them just a touch too cheerfully.

“Okay, let’s do it,” Miles decided without consulting either of the other two.

 

 

Louis had never been into sci-fi because he didn’t like to think about all the terrible shit that could happen in the future. He was a one day at a time, at most a week, kind of guy.

Watching Rand access the fabric of motherfucking time with his fucking qi was so far beyond him that he legitimately considered throwing in the towel right then and there and ditching the whole Spiderman thing forever, because really, he could get on just fine without it.

He’d never seen Miles so excited.

Rand held himself still with enormous effort, his hands glowing and shaking, and beseeched them to “Go _now._ ”

 

 

The fabric of space and time, for the record, felt like a sheet. You pushed your way through it, twisting, but not tearing. And then after a brief struggle, you found yourself free and cold.

And standing in a pitch-black pit with no way of knowing which way was up or down.

“Holy fuck,” Angel whispered.

 

 

They flicked on their phones for some light and found a wet switch which turned on a single, small floodlight above them. It looked like it had recently been wired.

Behind them the cave was covered in rubble. It looked deeper somehow. And then it hit them that the wall they’d seen behind Rand in the cave on their side was no longer there. There, just inside the mouth, was Daredevil’s puddle of blood. It was eerily…wet. Louis told himself it was just the humidity clinging to the stain.

They had to climb up the old elevator shaft using their hands and feet and web because no one had installed a new one yet. And then after that nightmare, they found themselves crawling up onto the metal grate that Jessica had originally scared them shitless on. Louis looked up and was astounded to find that the weird light they’d been bathed in on the way up wasn’t artificial or a reflection of the one at the bottom in the dome’s ceiling. It was the skyline. Neighboring streetlights. There wasn’t a dome, only a hastily built wall around the perimeter of the sinkhole. On the way over to the edge, Miles noticed a switch and clicked it. It turned the little twinkle of floodlight at the bottom of the pit off.

“Good to know,” Angel shivered. They climbed over the makeshift wall.

 

 

They landed, feet first, in the middle of Midtown, which looked almost like theirs, only all the advertisements were for movies and shows which had become memes over the years. The traffic was deafening. The streetlights and widened lanes the city had worked on for fucking _years_ were missing.

They needed to get to 57th and 6th, but Louis felt so turned around, it was almost like he wasn’t in the right city. He’d been 14, ten years ago, Miles’s age. He’d spent that time in the Bronx, like Angel. His people couldn’t afford much in the city. Angel shared this experience, only she’d been in primary school still. And Miles just a little one. At least Rand was right on this particular point, they weren’t in danger of running into themselves.

“I think maybe this calls for Spiderman,” Angel said. Louis looked at the traffic and then at the hustle and decided that yeah, that might be for the best. They found an empty alley and changed into their suits.

It started raining as they did.

They headed north to 57th.

 

 

And could find no goddamn seed pod anywhere between 6th and 3rd. Miles tapped at the phone’s tracking map irritably.

“It’s supposed to be here,” he grumbled.

“Maybe we’re in the wrong year?” Angel offered, “Maybe it was a glitch after all?”

Louis sighed and dragged them under an awning. It was starting to rain harder and he didn’t want the tracker to get waterlogged while they were stuck in another fucking dimension.

“This thing is broken,” Miles diagnosed. He shook it a little in the wise ways of yore. Louis held out his hand for it and tried to make sense of the screen. The little blip that was allegedly the seed pod was merrily blinking away in the alley opposite. But they’d already searched it, several times over. Even on hands and knees, scrabbling around under the trash.

“Maybe we’re coming at this the wrong way,” he said, “Maybe it’s up high.” They all looked up to the top of the buildings on each side of the alley. They looked…slippery. Fuck, he didn’t want to climb anymore, he was going to have nightmares of that elevator shaft for _weeks._

The boom of gunfire snapped all of them out of their reverie and into defense mode. It had come from nearby. There was a shout, then a scuffle, then the sound of splashing as someone ran away. Louis immediately threw himself out into the alley to see if anyone had been hurt. Someone staggered out of the alley after the other guy and kicked themselves into a sprint, full tilt, sending up sprays of gutter water as they went.

 Mile and Angel crashed into Louis, standing in the center of the street.

His heart was beating double time.

Even in the dark of the alley, he could see the second person’s clothes.

They were fire-engine red.

 

 

He didn’t have time to think, just grabbed a fistful of the other two’s suits and flung them forward with him in a run, chasing after the footsteps as they splashed up north, towards Central Park.

“Holy shit,” Angel swore, apparently catching onto the same thing that he had.

“Jesus, fuck, he’s fast,” she noted.

There was no one but a few waterlogged tourists standing around the gate to Central Park, nor anyone running down the side-streets leading to the avenues on either side.

Goddamnit.

They’d lost him.

Angel swore and spun in a circle, then grabbed he and Miles who were doing the same to pull them out of the middle of the park entrance to the trees inside so that they’d be less conspicuous. Louis’s heart throbbed and he spun around to face the park, searching for another hint of red. What he got was the bang of another bullet being fired. It scared him and he jumped and felt Miles do the same next to him. He couldn’t tell which way it had come from through the noise of the traffic. It sounded straight ahead, somewhere in the park.

They were too far away to hear anyone running through the rain and the groan of cars on their right.

Fuck. _Fuck._ They’d lost him. And from the sounds of it, he could be hurt.

If Colleen was right, that seed pod was following him.

“Fuck,” he said out loud.

“That thing’s moved with us,” Miles interrupted, trying to see through the rain into the park.

Of course, it had; it was a fucking parasite. And its host was just bouncing around in plain sight. Getting shot at, apparently, Jesus Christ, baby Spidey, you’re not fucking bulletproof.

Wait, baby Spidey.

“Miles,” he said, “You and Spidey, you know when he’s near you, right?”

Miles didn’t respond right away, probably trying to work out where in that alley Louis had lost his damn mind. Then it clicked.

“Oh shit, yeah.”

“Can you feel him? Is he still here?”

He and Angel stood back and waited while Miles pressed his hands to his head and tried to reach out or whatever the fuck he did with his Spidey Sense. He pulled back.

“No, he’s not here anymore.”

Angel swore. Louis tried to regroup. He looked at the screen of the tracker. It was hard to read through the water dripping onto it, but it looked like it was slowly moving north, unevenly. Sluggishly. He pointed this out to the group and Angel took it and watched it for a moment. The rush of traffic was making it hard for Louis to think. Were they just supposed to chase after the dot? If it got too close to baby Spidey, would it latch onto him and make him sick too? Wait, oh dear god. If Spidey died ten years early--He’d been involved in so many events in the city. He’d saved hundreds of people, if not thousands in ten years. If the pod got him when he was a kid, that was hundreds of lives that wouldn’t move with them into the next decade.

“We can’t let that thing get him,” he whispered.

“We’ll just get him first,” Angel declared out of the blue, she shoved the phone in her pocket and grabbed Miles’s shoulder. “Listen, kid, now’s your time to shine. You’ve gotta make your Spidey Sense better than this thing’s, like yesterday.”

“What?” Miles asked.

“ _You_ ,” Angel said slowly, “Need to make _your_ Spidey Sense better so that _we_ can find Spidey before it does. And then we can hold him hostage or whatever until that thing comes to find him and then, bam. Look, we got it.”

“That’s not how it works,” Miles countered.

“It is now,” Angel informed him.

“I can’t just make it better,” Miles tried to argue.

“Bitch, _try_ ,” Angel snapped.

And before Louis could intervene to try to settle people down, Miles put his hands on his head and did. He furrowed his brow hard and bit his lip. He took a few deep breaths and then he snapped his head up, eyes wide.

“I got him?” he said in surprise.

“You got him?” Angel repeated in amazement.

“I got him!”

“Where is he?”

“He’s,” Miles stopped and started looking around. “He’s close. He’s—”

And the kid flew back like he’d been slapped. He swung around with web all over his mask and by the time the three of them figured out which direction it had come from, there was no sign that anyone had ever been there.

The rain rushed in their ears.

“Well, fuck,” Angel said.

 

 

They had three days to find the damned pod, which, Louis was realizing, was actually three days to find Spidey and hold him still for an hour.

And they’d already fucked up.

Spidey must have seen them while he was out and circled back after he was done with his perp to figure out why the hell there were suddenly three people out in the world dressed like him. Nowadays, it wasn’t uncommon to see street performers dressed up as Spidey, cadging for money from tourists in train stations and around Union Square. But ten years back, Spidey had just been getting started; he’d had a whole community of haters for the first three quarters of his vigilante career and an ongoing feud with _The Bugle_ (which, hilariously, he revealed that he’d interned at).

People didn’t run around dressed like Spiderman in the streets yet.

That might have been their first mistake.

Their second mistake was thinking that they could simply catch Spiderman. The same guy who did physics in a half-coma. Spidey was smart and Louis should have known that he’d been smart from the outset. He’d definitely noticed them chasing him and had decided that that was not a something he wanted. And then he’d sent them a message, specifically Miles a message, to back off.

Louis considered the fact that Baby Spidey might be territorial. He wasn’t for them, but mostly because he was more than happy to delegate jobs where he could. Their Spidey worked a full-time job in addition to doing some freelance photography, he was too busy and tired to run around defending some arbitrary boundaries. But again, they knew jack about what Spidey did before their time.

Louis tried to think back to the Youtube videos. Peter had seemed pretty laid back in them, if a bit earnest.

It was close to midnight and what they needed was a place to crash and get out of the rain for a bit. It was too loud outside to plan anything productive. The other two agreed and they ran off to Hell’s Kitchen, where Spidey had introduced them to one of Daredevil’s old hidey holes.

 

 

It was a broken roof in an old church. The roof fell into a small attic; it wasn’t visible from the outside though, someone had laid metal sheeting over it to keep out the rain. You just had to know where it was. Thankfully, it still existed when they got there.

They changed out of their suits, then sat in the wood, quiet for moment.

“He’s not very friendly,” Miles noted irritably. The web had not wanted to come of his mask; it was still stubbornly sticking to it and anything else that touched it. It must have been an early iteration, or maybe just one that Spidey hadn’t taught them how to use.

“If some rando gang showed up trying to get all up in your business, you wouldn’t be too friendly either,” Angel pointed out. “Maybe we gotta make friends.”

“Make friends with Spidey,” Louis repeated.

Their Spidey was like a porcupine on a good day. People seemed to adopt him more than he went out of his way to make friends.

“Make friends with Peter Parker,” Angel clarified. She fixed her gaze onto Miles. “ _You_ two have a lot in common. We’re too old,” she said, gesturing between herself and Louis. It was a good point.

Miles pouted.

“I don’t want to be friends with him,” he said.

“You want him to die?” Angel snapped back. His face fell.

“No.”

“That’s what I thought.”

Louis listened to the rain pattering away on the steel sheet.

“Spidey’s a reasonable guy,” he mused, “Maybe if we just get him still long enough to talk to him, he’ll understand. His life could seriously be in danger, anyhow. He deserves to know.”

“So what, we’re just gonna go out and flag him down?” Angel asked. “We don’t even know the first thing about him, besides the fact that he’s a fucking nerd.”

“Let’s figure it out then,” Louis said, “We can narrow our scope and meet him as Peter and maybe then he’d be willing to listen.”

 

 

Things they knew about Peter Parker:

  1. Did his undergrad at CUNY
  2. Did his masters at Cornell
  3. Originally from Queens
  4. Associated with Iron Man for a million years
  5. Has two grumpy best friends
  6. Very nerdy
  7. Very grumpy
  8. Likes dogs?



“How is this helpful?” Angel groaned. Miles had directed his attention to his phone. Lucky for them, ten years ago had wifi.

“Peter Parker, freshman, Academic Decathlon championship 2016,” Miles read, “Peter Parker, sophomore, Academic Decathlon championship 2017.”

Angel sat up in interest.

“For who?” Louis asked.

“Midtown School of Science and Technology,” he read.

“Damn, fancy,” Angel noted.

For real, fancy. What kind of kid went to school in Midtown?

“It’s close by here,” Miles noted.

“It’s the middle of the night,” Angel pointed out. He mugged at her.

“We can stop by in the morning.”

“We don’t even know what he looks like.”

“ _You_ don’t know what he looks like, I’m looking at ‘Queens Native Wins State Science Fair, 2015.’”

Louis let them squabble; it was really cute, actually, how science-y and nerdy Peter had been from the start. He must have worked hard to get into that high school. Peter’s uncle had died around Miles’s age; it sounded like he and his aunt had been just barely making ends meet for a while there. Kids like that deserved a shot at a fancy school, Louis figured. They knew what it meant.

Speaking of which, Peter was fiercely protective of his aunt, refusing to let any of their troop anywhere near his childhood home. Which was now posing a problem. Louis thought that maybe if they could get Peter somewhere he had the clear advantage and felt comfortable, he might be willing to talk with them. He checked the time; it was just about 1:30am.

“Hey,” he said, “Let’s head back to Queens.”

 

 

They left the safe place for the meeting roof in Queens; they had one in each of the boroughs. It took a while to get there, but the web made it go much faster than transit. Louis landed up on top of one of the buildings in Flushing. Angel toppled down next to him gracelessly, as was her custom. She immediately began pacing in a circle to get the nerves out.

Miles lightly touched down to look out at the city with him. They had a ways to go before they hit the meeting roof, but Louis needed a breather. He moved to look over the edge of the building to get a better feel for how high up they were, then had to do a double take because right there, down in the alley below them, was a kid soaked to the bone, shaking water out of his hair and throwing a backpack over his shoulder.

He was _tiny_. Wearing a huge khaki coat that looked oddly familiar. Louis seized the back of Miles’s jacket and walked him to the edge of the building, saying nothing. Angel gawked at him. As soon as Miles’s foot touched the corner of the ledge, the kid down below flinched violently and slapped his hands over his neck.

Miles flinched, too.

The tiny Peter looked up directly at them, frozen in place. Then he took a step back. Louis shook his head slowly and held out a soothing, open-palmed hand as a peace offering. Peter took another step back.

“It’s okay,” Louis soothed, letting go of Miles and trying to make his body language as open and non-threatening as possible.

The boy staring up at them was a child. All big dark eyes and pointed chin, growing into that square jaw. Pale as a ghost in the rain.

He was scared.

“It’s okay, we just want to talk,” Louis said. It was too loud for Peter to heard him through the rain and the few late-night taxis, but saying the words helped him relax his body.

He didn’t know what did it, but something snapped Peter’s attention away from them to the side of the road and he fucking gunned it.

Angel leapt down and tore after him without a word. Miles looked to Louis for confirmation that this was the correct course of action.

“Do we just go catch him?” he asked.

Louis sighed and got ready to jump.

“Not much choice, now. If we don’t get her first, Angel will chase him all night.”

They used the web to head in the general direction Angel had.

 

 

They caught up with Angel, in an unusual turn of events, headed back to the city proper. They crashed into her just as Peter threw out a line of webbing and went hurtling out sideways into traffic on the bridge. Like a fucking crazy person, holy _shit._

Mid-arc, he pulled out his mask and dragged it over his face, just in time to launch two lines of webbing towards the bridge’s support beams, one from each hand, to take him arcing between cars. He pulled himself up and crested between the main towers. He had total, even control over both lines of web, dropping them and launching more at the peak of his leap. It was stunning actually. Superhuman agility. Superhuman balance.

Super-fucking-human speed.

They had to pull the same stunt to keep up with him, and that shit was a test of fucking fate.

Peter Parker, Louis decided, was fearless. Instead of crashing down at the end of the bridge, he glanced behind him and threw himself bodily right at the roof of a nearby building. He crash-landed onto it, shoulder first and rolled twice before springing up into a sprint.

Never, in the eight months they’d been working together, had Louis seen Spidey use that move. It was almost parkour.

He and the others couldn’t land that shit, not a chance in hell. They crash-landed like normal people crash land on the roof and scrambled up to give chase down the fire-escapes. Miles flinched halfway down which told them they were back on the kid’s heels.

After a few seconds, Louis realized in horror that they were headed back to Hell’s Kitchen.

“No,” he said, “No, we need to stop. STOP.”

The other two couldn’t hear him, so he threw some extra muscle into his knees and took wider steps until he overtook them.

“Stop,” he shouted back, “Or we’re gonna get our asses kicked by Daredevil.”

They put the brakes on it. Tumbled to a halt just on the boundary line into the Kitchen. Peter had vanished into the old buildings and the rain. They all panted and exchanged looks on the rooftop.

“That,” Angel said between breaths, “Little shit is fast.”

“Yeah, and now he’s terrified, and now he’s going to tell Daredevil that three copy-cats are trying to kill him,” Louis pointed out. “We have to be the good guys here, Angel. We can’t go chasing him like that.”

Miles stared out at the city before him with his hand on his neck. Louis checked him over to make sure he wasn’t having an asthma attack or anything. He didn’t meet Louis’s eyes. He started edging away from the end of the roof.

“I think we should go,” he murmured.

Louis tried to look where he was looking. It was just pissing down though, even Angel seemed fuzzy and she was only a few yards away.

“What do you mean, Miles?” he asked, quieter this time, so as not to freak the kid out any more.

“I just think we need to go,” he repeated.

“I think so too,” a voice growled as its owner emerged from over the edge.

 


	6. 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “No spells,” Murdock snapped, spinning up off the floor.  
> “Okay, sure, no spells,” Peter agreed casually.

Nothing in the world could have prepared Louis for the unbridled Daredevil. Sure, Mr. Murdock had been a little moody and short and definitely weird with them during the whole Fisk fiasco, but he’d never been cruel, and had certainly not directed that energy at them. It was different, Louis realized, when you were on the other side.

The suit that he’d grown up knowing as Daredevil’s wasn’t done justice by any of the tabloids. Those horns were a lot less cheesy up close, where you could see that someone had tried to shoot the guy in the fucking head. Murdock’s teeth were startlingly white in his snarl and he slunk like a predator. He was a little shorter than Louis, but that meant fuck-all because as soon as he took a step forward, you suddenly really wanted to take a step back.

Water dripped off his clenched fists from the storm, but Louis couldn’t tell whether or not it was his imagination making it seem redder than that dripping off his own.

“We-We don’t mean any harm,” he said, moving back.

“I doubt that,” Daredevil rumbled. He cracked his knuckles loud enough that Louis could hear it through the rain.

“Listen, man, this is a misunderstanding,” Louis said. He tried to hold out his hands, but then remembered that Mr. Murdock was blind. Fuck. You seriously wouldn’t have known.

“Oh, I’m sure it is,” Daredevil replied. Then jolted to the side where Angel had shoved him.

“Lay off,” she snarled and Louis wanted to wrap her face in his arms both to protect her and make her shut the fuck up.

Daredevil was taken aback by her interference and, presumably, her guts. She shoved him again and told him more forcefully this time, “Lay. Off.”

He caught her hands and threw her back hard enough to knock her to the roof’s concrete. Then he swiveled his head back to Louis.

“They’re both yours?” he asked.

“No,” Louis told him honestly, they were all Spidey’s. “Well, yes. But not how you’re thinking. They’re my teammates. Please, listen. We’re not trying to pick a fight here.”

“You’re not convincing me,” Daredevil said.

“You’re in danger,” Louis pleaded with him, “Peter is too.”

That was the exact wrong thing to say, it turned out. Daredevil twitched and he lifted his chin. His snarl dropped off his face and Louis’s body knew before his brain did that that meant that he was about to fucking die.

“No, no, wait, Mr. Murdock,” he shouted, just as Daredevil started to stoop a bit. He could practically see the shock shuddering through the armor, “Yeah, I know you. We’ve met before. I know it sounds crazy, but Danny Rand sent us.”

Fucking yikes, that was a punch. He managed to dodge the next one, but only just. And that didn’t matter, because before he knew it, there was a fist seizing the front of his jacket, and he was being slammed against the side of storage unit. Again. And Again. And—

“Double D, _no_ ,” a high voice suddenly interrupted. Louis pulled his attention away from the tangled mess of his fingers gripping at Daredevil’s in a futile attempt to stop him from pulling him back for another round. Spidey was standing on the very edge of the roof, absolutely drenched with rain, he’d taken off his mask and his skin was nearly white. His coat was drooping, stuck to his hands from the water. He wasn’t wearing his backpack anymore.

“Let him go,” he demanded in a flat tone, “I was just scared, they didn’t hurt me. Let him go _._ ”

Daredevil didn’t release his hold.

“He knows our names, kid,” he puffed. “Claims he knows one of mine.”

 _I’m_ one of yours, Louis was desperate to say.

“Give him a chance to say why,” Peter said. His voice didn’t waver, it wasn’t a request. It was an order, clear even through the chatter of rain. “If he’s lying, fine. We’ll deal with all of them.”

How could a fifteen-year-old kid sound that ominous.

Fuck. Had Peter gotten softer with age?

“We’ll tell you,” he promised both of them. “I swear.”

Daredevil pressed his forehead in close and hysterically, Louis thought his aftershave actually smelled really nice. Daredevil dropped him and released his hold on the front of his jacket.

“Fine,” he grunted. “Get up. Let’s go.”

 

 

Daredevil took them to an old warehouse by the docks, not far from where they’d fished him out a few months back. He shook off the rain and put them all in a line under the awning, Peter included, with the firm order to ‘wait here, don’t say anything.’

As soon as he turned the corner, Peter leaned out of line and asked them in a whisper, “Who are you guys?”

“Uh, he just said—” Miles started.

“I know what he said, but I’m the guy who is about to try to get him not to break all your teeth, if I were you, I’d throw me a bone,” he whispered forcefully, and despite everything, Louis found he really, sincerely liked him.

“Where are you from?” Peter asked, staring up into Louis’s face.

“We’re from all over the city, but more importantly, uh, we’re from the,” God. How do you say it without sounding insane, “Future. We’re from ten years from now.”

Peter just cocked his head and said in a normal voice, “Oh, like Wade?”

“Kid,” Daredevil barked, sending them all a foot in the air, “What the fuck did I just tell you?”

“Hey, I think these guys might have traded places with Wade!”

“And I think that we need another boundaries talk,” Daredevil snapped, not in the gravel.

“Nooooo,” Peter moaned.

Mr. Murdock shook his head in exasperation and ignored him to unlock the padlock keeping the warehouse door closed. He rolled it open. He shoved Peter inside by the nape of the neck first. Then glared towards the rest of them until the shuffled past him. He closed it behind them.

It was dark, cold, and musty but it wasn’t wet and Louis would take any blessing thrown his way at that point.

“Is there a light?” Peter asked. Louis heard him move away from them in the dark. “Double D?”

Mr. Murdock huffed.

“Switch under the window,” he said.

“Gee, thanks, where’s the window?”

“In the wall, pal. What do you want me to tell you?”

“Why are you so grumpy? Left or right.”

“Three guesses. Right.”

Mr. Murdock had 100% gotten softer with age. This him was all jagged edges and Louis didn’t have to see to know Angel was getting her hackles up. Miles had never met the guy, only heard his voice on the phone, and he, no doubt, had formed a less than complimentary opinion as well. That was a little unfair, Louis thought, their Daredevil was actually pretty funny and genuinely cared about their wellbeing. And it was the same guy, Louis knew, he was just looking out for Peter the best he knew how.

A yellow light flickered on and revealed Peter standing on his toes to reach a switch high on the wall. He blinked a few times then shook the remaining water out of his hair. He didn’t look even a little tired, even though they were coming up on 3am. Miles had started to flag a little with the lack of adrenaline.

Mr. Murdock didn’t remove any of his armor, just crossed his arms and tilted an ear slightly closer to them.

“Speak now,” he said, “Or forever hold your peace.”

“Like in a wedding,” Peter cheerfully added. Mr. Murdock sent a hard look his way. He was not cowed. Not even a little.

“Not like in a wedding, in a ‘I will strangle you otherwise’ way,” Mr. Murdock expounded.

“You have such a bad attitude,” Angel informed him.

“You’ve done speech therapy, work two retail jobs, and haven’t slept in two days,” Mr. Murdock snapped, “You wanna keep playing this game?”

“Double D, be nice,” Peter ordered. He rejoined them in the center of the room and next to Mr. Murdock he looked even younger. “You said you’re from the future, what do you mean by that? Why are you here? I would ask you not to lie, but if you know Double D like you seem like you do, then you already know that’s not gonna work.”

Louis tried to explain, but halfway through he was pretty sure he lost Peter. The kid was watching Miles with interest. Mr. Murdock, however, had shifted out of his stiffness and dropped his hands his hips, occasionally tipping his head when Louis said something especially outlandish-sounding. Like ‘your husband told us about the pod.’

“I have a husband?” Mr. Murdock interrupted.

Oh, shit. Was that not a thing? Louis had just kind of assumed that he and Foggy were one of those forever couples.

“Yeah, it’s Mr. Castle,” Peter soundly announced.

His punishment was swift and merciless.

“Uh yeah, I don’t know if I can tell you his name, though, might fuck up space-time or something,” Louis said.

“Maybe it’s Hawkeye,” Peter offered, having learned nothing from his previous ordeal. “Maybe you guys got married in the dumpster you met in.”

Louis wondered if maybe he’d been wrong about him, maybe baby Peter was actually kind of dumb. Murdock slowly turned his head toward the kid and he threw himself into a fighting stance. Murdock gave this show a few seconds of unamused attention, then directed his gaze back to Louis and co.

“Okay, so my husband—”

“Or you know it might be—”

“My husband, who will not be disrespected by juvenile arachnids, whoever he may be, is working with Danny over some kind of—”

“It could be Foggy, you know.”

Murdock turned to Peter with fury so great it was cold.

“Are you done?” he asked. Louis shivered.

“Dreams do come true, sometimes, Double D.”

“I said, are you done?”

Peter pouted at him.

“You’re extra mean without Wade.”

“Spidey, this is important. Get your shit together. I’m not gonna ask again.” Peter squinted at him, evaluating. Then he jerked over to the three of them and said,

“Hey, does this have to do with the balls?”

Which was enough to wake Miles up from his stupor. Angel looked to Louis for how to proceed and he shrugged.

“Yeah, possibly,” she said for him, “Did it look like a little silver ball bearing? Kind of like a—”

“A peach,” Peter finished for her. “About yay-big?” he held his hands together to show the hollow there. Then he turned back to Murdock, “The one you said was cursed?”

Murdock had gone from skeptical to stiff to definitely freaked out.

“Alright, we’re done,” he suddenly announced and made for the door. Peter threw a hand out, stuffed it into a gap in his armor and, to the trio’s shock, physically dragged him back. Murdock leaned hard out of the grip, but Peter didn’t seem bothered by that.

“Double D, not everything’s cursed,” he lectured, “And not all curses are bad, that’s just what Christians tell other people to destabilize their societies.”

“I am complicit in de-stabilization, I feel plenty bad, I’m not adding a fucking curse on top of that,” Murdock gritted out, nearly parallel to the floor with how hard he was pulling away. Peter didn’t bat an eye. Angel was gaping a little bit. Spidey never used his super-strength around them. He’d mentioned it off hand once, but the need for a demonstration hadn’t yet arisen.

“It’s not a curse,” Peter said simply. He released his hold and let Murdock crash to the ground and swear. “Might be a spell, though. What else do you know about it?”

“No spells,” Murdock snapped, spinning up off the floor.

“Okay, sure, no spells,” Peter agreed casually.

Louis didn’t know what to make of them. This relationship looked very little like the one they had back home. This was more siblings, that was more student-teacher.

“It’s making you sick, both of you, in our world,” Angel explained.

“What kind of sick?” Peter asked.

“Cursed sick,” Murdock answered for her, “And if it’s fucking with us there, then it’ll fuck with us here and my secretary will poison me if I miss any more meetings.”

Who the fuck was his secretary? Good god, man, look at your life choices.

“Yeah, she probably will, and then you’ll never get married,” Peter mused. Murdock turned to him dangerously. He edged just out of grasp.

“So it’s making us sick, and Mr. Rand, that’s Iron Fist right? Sent you to get it? That’s weird, why would he send you? Seems like the kind of thing Wade would be stoked to volunteer for.”

“Wade’s not allowed to time travel anymore,” Murdock interjected. Peter perked up and cocked his head. He was starting to look kind of cold. So was Miles. They needed to find a place to get warm and sleep.

“Why not?”

“I don’t know, something with the X-men. He’s not talking to any of them again.”

“He’s never talking to them.”

“I don’t blame them.”

“You love Wade.”

“I hate him.”

“Okay, fine. He loves you, anyways.”

Murdock grimaced hard enough to contort his face.

“We came because we’re nobodies at this time, so we weren’t gonna chance running into ourselves,” Louis explained.

“But you’re somebodies in your time then?” Peter asked. Fuck, he was sharp.

“Well, yeah, I guess we kind of are,” Louis admitted, “But I’m not sure we can tell you about that either.”

Peter surveyed him and then took in Miles and Angel. Then he grabbed Murdock’s arm and dragged him down so that he could whisper something in his ear. Murdock allowed this, then pulled back a little at something he said. Peter yanked him back closer to continue.

“You’re sure?” Murdock asked.

Peter stared at Miles with a hawk’s stare. Miles tried not to show how much that was freaking him out.

“Yeah, I’m sure,” Peter decided. “You guys need somewhere to crash?”

 

 

“He definitely knows that I’m like him,” Miles whispered.

“I can hear you,” Murdock sing-songed from the other side of his apartment. It really was Danny Rand’s place, but it was slightly more homey with the mismatching sofa and chair and Murdock opening and closing cabinets in the kitchen. He was determined that he had tea of some kind and periodically he’d bring a box out to Angel and make her read it only to immediately go back to shove it somewhere else. He’d brought her dried ginger, fennel seeds, and cardamom so far, which Louis supposed probably smelt a lot like tea to him.

It was a little jarring to see how much his demeanor changed when he no longer perceived someone as a threat.

“Mr. Murdock,” he said, “You didn’t touch that ball, did you?”

“Call me Matt,” Matt said from the pantry, “Did not. Put a bowl over it. Smelled weird. Like,” he paused and rubbed at the bottom of his face and leaned against the counter trying to remember. His hair was much darker and he was skinnier than he had been when they’d met him. “Kind of like—how to describe it. Like bad lemongrass, kinda sweet but rotten. Citrusy. Yellow, I’m sure it smelled yellow.”

“You have synesthesia, Mr. Murdock?” Miles asked. Matt had forced him onto the sofa’s pull-out bed, collected about ten thousand blankets from the recesses of his apartment, and piled them all on him, having apparently decided that this was how you dealt with cold people.

“I’ve got so many problems, I don’t keep track anymore,” Matt said. He determinedly pushed a smooth tin can of what actually was tea into Angel’s hands. She confirmed it and he was enormously pleased. He fed them this and then moved back a wall panel to reveal his own bedroom. He bid them goodnight and them they could help themselves to whatever they wanted in the place, then closed the door.

“Spidey knows I’m like him,” Miles said once Matt had vanished. “It was weird being there with him, he kept moving in and out of range to like, force the signal.”

“Of course, he was,” Angel said, “He’s never seen anyone like you, like him, I guess. I think he’s kind of excited.”

“He was a pretty sweet kid,” Louis observed.

“Yeah, wonder what happened,” Angel agreed.

 

 

They accidentally overslept the next morning and woke up to Wade Wilson spinning around in circles on one of the stools at Matt’s breakfast nook. He seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. He didn’t stop spinning to say good morning and ask who the fuck they were and where they’d come from.

“Red says you’re here to remove his latest menace,” he said, digging through Matt’s pile of mail without a care in the world for privacy. “Called me over here couple days back all panicky, you know. Thought the damn thing was a rat, the way he was going on about it. And then I thought he was fucking with me, ‘cause you know nothing was under that bowl. Super weird. And then here comes Pete, all ‘Wade do eggs move in the shell? Wade, at what temperature does mercury become a fluid? Wade, what’s the definition of sentience?’ like I know any of that shit. You know how much I lie to that kid? Christ, he makes my ass _work_.”

None of them had asked for any of this information, but it was what they got. Angel was pleased, however. She and Wade had always gotten on.

“Where’d the thing go? The not-rat?” she asked. Wade stopped his spinning and made a show of thinking, humming and pressing his knuckles into his cheek.

“Space maybe? Possibly up Red’s ass. You never know what that’s guy’s into. Actually, no, that’s a lie, I know exactly what that guy’s into. He’s a little much for me if I’m honest, and I do like someone who knows what they want. Oh! Right, Spidey said something this morning, hold on just a second, babe.”

He searched all his ammunition pockets but did not find his phone. He then hopped off the stool to throw open the wall panel and rifle through Matt’s shit like he owned it. He rooted around the bed and fished out a set of keys which he looked at curiously and tossed over his shoulder into the living room, then went back in and found his phone.

The trio watched from the couch and tried not to think about how it had gotten there.

“Oh, so Pete says when he got in last night, he found your l’il peach thing in his pocket. He says it smelled weird, so he put it in the freezer. Says it was still there when he left for school.”

He.

Put it.

In the freezer.

That was Peter Parker’s response to ‘this thing is very dangerous and will make you gravely ill.’

Louis didn’t know whether to laugh or cry.

“He says he can bring it to you after school if you want?”

“Yeah, let’s do that. Tell him not to touch it,” Louis managed to creak.

 

 

“It’s dumb and I hate it,” Peter told them when they arrived at the address he’d directed them to. It was a very cozy apartment. There were a billion pillows on the couch and little dishes of polished stones next to plants in every window. It smelled like bread and sage. It had to be his aunt’s place.

He opened the freezer door for them and pointed at the little ball sitting in the center of the top shelf irritably.

“It doesn’t obey the laws of physics,” Peter complained, “It moves without an energy source and it’s velocity isn’t slowed by friction.”

Louis and Angel nodded sympathetically, because Peter didn’t appear to be looking for an answer here.

“I asked Mr. Stark about it and now he’s _freaking_ out,” Peter chattered on while they looked for something to take it home in. Was a paper bag sufficient to contain its bloodlust? “ _He_ said that he ran into one of them when he made the big arc reactor and he told me that if I touch it, I’ll die.”

Holy shit, good to know.

“He got any tips for killing it?” Angel asked as Louis tried to pry the thing (bracelet hand only, he wasn’t an idiot), out of the freezer. It did not want to go. It was cold enough to burn his hand, like it realized it wasn’t getting its way and it was throwing a tantrum.

“He made a video log of all the ways he tried,” Peter told her.

“Did he touch it, though?” Miles asked.

“I mean, not with skin,” Peter told him, pleased that Miles was talking to him. Louis suspected that he wanted to become friends. Baby Peter was so fucking friendly, he might have actually stood a chance of breaking through Miles’s reserved nature. Seriously, though. Friendly and chatty and overwhelmingly optimistic.

He and Angel had been arguing with their eyebrows the entire time they’d been there over whether or not the kid was actually their guy. Louis was harboring thoughts that the he had been killed and swapped out with a depressed clone at some point. He couldn’t know for sure, but he thought Angel was of the opinion that Spidey was the same as this baby Peter somewhere just beneath the surface. Or so her eyebrows implied, anyways.

“How did he touch it if not with skin?” Miles prodded.

“Gloves,” Peter said, “Iron Man gloves. Or his caustic chemicals gloves. Or he’s got a thousand different kind of grabby things. I’d say Dum-E, but he doesn’t have pincers anymore since the fire. Oh! He had Miss Potts do it, well. I say ‘had.’ She got mad and uh. Actually, Miss Potts was the one who got rid of it last time.”

“She killed it?” Miles asked. Peter made a complicated expression.

“Uh-huh,” he said, defending his spot in the Worst Liars World Championship lineup.

“How’d she do it?” Miles asked, because he wasn’t very good at reading faces or tonal fluctuation yet.

“Uh,” Peter stammered, “Pretty sure she, um. Burned it.”

“How?”

Child, stop while you’re ahead. The boy does not want to speak.

“Well how else do you burn things?”

“Fire.”

“Yeah, so fire.”

“She lit it on fire.”

“Uh-huh.”

“You don’t sound so sure.”

“Oh, I’m sure.”

“What did she burn it with?”

“I told you, fire.”

Miles frowned. Peter would not look any of them in the face all of the sudden.

“No, like, matches? Did she have to put lighter fluid on it or did it go up by itself.”

“Miss Potts doesn’t need lighter fluid,” Peter said quietly to his wrists.

Okay, that was enough. Louis could not handle the idea of Pepper Potts with superpowers at that moment. And he was fairly certain Miles was making Peter uncomfortable. He moved to offer a new topic, but Peter got there first.

“Hey!” he said brightly, “You’re like me, aren’t you? You’ve got a mutation?”

Miles frowned and didn’t want to answer. Peter softened.

“It’s okay, it’s not a bad thing. Well, mostly a bad thing. Well, _always_ a bad thing. It can be a good thing too, you know? You can help people with whatever you’ve got, even if it seems really weird.”

“I know,” Miles mumbled, “That’s how I met you. The big you.”

“’Cause we’re the same?”

“We’re not exactly the same.”

Peter suddenly grabbed Miles’s shoulders with serious eyes.

“Are you B43?” he demanded.

“Uh, what?”

“B43, did you get bit by B43? The test group? At Os-corp? I’ve been trying to figure out which one bit me, and I’ve got it down to three possible suspects, and I _think_ it’s B77, but I’m not positive because I don’t have like, venom, or anything. So that leaves B43 or A10, but A10 gets…furry. So, I’m holding out for B77.”

“Uh, no, I didn’t get bit in a lab,” Miles said, which was the first Louis had heard of it. Peter was extremely concerned by this news.

“Someone _stole_ a spider from a lab?” he asked, absolutely scandalized. “You can’t take test subjects _home_ , that’s asking for invasive species and like, lizard people. That’s asking for lizard people, you don’t even know. They are _mean_ , man. They are the worst kind of people.”

“Peter do you have a pair of pliers or something?” Louis broke in, now that the two were veering into unnecessary trauma. He was starting to understand Spidey’s obsession with lab safety.

Peter hopped up and then disappeared into a closet for a few moments while Louis scolded Miles and told him to keep it non-personal. Before returning to the task at hand with Angel.

The little pod fucker did not want to get out of the freezer. Louis was about ready to break the plastic shelving and just take the whole thing in one piece. While he and Angel was intimidating it via face, Peter wriggled between them, wrapped the pliers around the pod, and gave them an abrupt little twist to the side. It made a noise like a pipe being broken. He held the pliers out to Angel and she carefully accepted them and dropped the angry little asshole into the bag.

Peter looked up at them.

“Is that it, then?”

Angel held up the bag and tipped her head back and forth.

“I guess so,” Louis told him.

“Okay, good, that wasn’t so bad. So where do you take it now?”

Was he allowed to say?

“Back to where we came out, I guess.”

“It’ll probably try to escape you know,” Peter pointed out.

That was true. Huh.

How to account for this.

Peter cocked his head and stared at the bag for a minute.

“It eats energy?” he asked.

They confirmed this.

“Does it matter what kind?”

They explained that it liked his and Matt’s especially, but had already gotten a taste for Matt’s in particular. He pulled out his phone and dialed a number.

“Hi Double D, are you in court? Oh, good. Are you going to mass tonight? Perfect. Can you stop by my place? Like soon. No curses, I promise. No spells, either. Chakra isn’t a thing, we’ve already discussed this. Dude, are you coming or not? Okay, thanks, see you soon.”

“Do you have like an hour?” he asked the three of them.

 


	7. 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> “Red, it is a teeny, teeny, tiny, itsy, bitsy, baby cut. That’s all,” Wade cooed at him.   
> “For a false idol,” Matt whimpered.

“This is a ritual,” Matt swore from the corner of the kitchen he’d crammed himself into.

“Red, it is a teeny, teeny, tiny, itsy, bitsy, baby cut. That’s all,” Wade cooed at him.

“For a false idol,” Matt whimpered.

So apparently the only true way to defeat Daredevil was to force his involvement with the occult.

It was super effective.

Louis hadn’t believed that people that Catholic existed anymore. Angel was delighted with this news because she suddenly had so much more ammunition to harass Matt with the next time she saw him.

“It likes your blood, nay, it loves your blood,” Wade chattered, trying to get behind Matt so he could pin him in place.

“Why the hell does it have to be _my_ blood?”

“Well, it sure ain’t looking for a virgin, sweetheart.”

Peter was not offended by the implication, just stood with his hip leaned up against the counter, patiently waiting for Wade to procure blood for the sacrifice. That is, to give the pod some encouragement to stay in the bag.

“I could be a virgin.”

“Red, you are many things but a virgin ain’t one.”

“It’s a state of mind, Wilson, you wouldn’t know because you don’t have one.”

“A state?”

“Jesus fucking Christ.”

There was an awe-inspiring struggle which ended with Matt fighting like a holy terror in Wade’s lap for nearly five minutes straight while Wade did his best to contain the potential property damage. Matt fought himself tired and Wade still wouldn’t let up on his grip. Realizing his defeat, Matt miserably pressed as much of himself as he could into the space behind Wade’s neck. Wade hugged him and shushed him patronizingly.

“I hate both of you,” Matt moaned, all twisted up behind Wade’s neck. “I hate _all_ of you.”

“Don’t we know it, baby doll, now let’s have one of them pretty little hands,” Wade soothed.

Matt did not go easily, despite his exhaustion. And his hands were neither little or pretty. The one Wade rejected might have been broken.

Wade nicked the thumb of the hand in better condition with a knife and wrapped a piece of cloth around it. Matt started praying. Begging the holy father for forgiveness, swearing loyalty to the church and only the church, and beseeching the Lord to save him from these _heathens_.

He was hilarious. Even Miles was hiding his giggles.

Once a sufficient amount of Murdock blood had been obtained, the cloth was carefully dropped into the real demon’s bag and, while Matt composed himself, they got ready to leave.

Peter gave them all a hug before they did and wished them well while Matt made them swear they’d dispose of the horrible beast with fire and holy water. He left before they did, came back to retrieve his cane, then left again.

Wade waved after them with both hands and then they were back off to Midtown.

 

 

Danny Rand’s big plan to destroy the horrible tyrant, destroyer of arachnids, and conqueror of devils, was to take a hammer to it. But Thor himself must have powdered the dead one because this one would not fucking break.

“Um,” Miles stuttered as they all stood back and watched Rand put his back into it, “I think the answer is fire.”

Rand paused in his workout to give Miles his complete, undivided attention.

“Fire?”

“Yeah, the Peter from back then said that Iron Man came across one and destroyed it with fire.”

The Defenders assessed the lack of damage the pod had taken.

“Okay, so let’s burn it,” Rand said.

 

 

It would not fucking burn. They couldn’t get the temperature high enough to get it to ignite. Lighter fluid did not help. Rand summoning his crazy fist thing and then promptly passing out from over-exertion and Luke Cage taking a shot at slamming his own closed fist onto it didn’t either.

Jessica disappeared for a little while and came back with a blow torch, but even that didn’t seem to be enough to get through to it.

“Maybe we should take it to Miss Potts,” Miles offered the room full of frustration.

 

 

They took it to Miss Potts. Rather, they took it to Stark Industries and stated that they had something they really needed to talk to Iron Man about and were given a very polite line about how Mr. Stark was very busy and unable to see members of the public. Angel, however, took the initiative while this was happening to take the bag over to the metal detector all the people in lab coats were going through to enter the lab on the far side of the Atrium. She watched them for a little while, then stuck just the arm holding the bag through it.

Stark Industries’ emergency alarm was like nothing Louis had ever heard. It toed the line of ear-drum shattering. It was toddler-in-a dollar-store level shrieking. Air raid sirens. Tsunami drills. All of it put together in a chest-shaking wail of panic.

Before anyone knew what was happening, Tony Stark himself had come skidding out of the stairwell and stood with an Iron Man gauntlet pointed right at Angel. She pulled her arm away from the definitely-not-just-a-metal detector and it shut the fuck up.

Silence in the atrium.

In PR terms, it did not look good for Tony Stark to be aiming a weapon of mass destruction at a tiny, 19-year-old girl in the middle of his lobby.

“What in god’s name is in that bag?” he asked while his entire staff inspected their eardrums.

“A demon,” Angel told him.

He did not understand. He took the proffered bag and suspiciously peeked inside it. He recoiled immediately.

“Where did you find this?” he asked her. She pointed at the line of Defenders standing at the reception desk.

“It lived underground and it tried to eat Spidey,” she explained simply. Stark stared at her, then the bag, then the Defenders, then back to her.

“You know who this is a job for?” he asked.

 

 

Pepper Potts stuck her head out of her office to squint at Stark and make him go through a checklist of all the things that were not wrong with him or the building before she allowed him to enter the office. She surveyed the rest of them and then pulled Stark in to speak alone for a moment.

Then they heard a yelp. Followed by a ‘where the hell did you get that thing?’ as if the guy had brought her a snake.

Then the door flew open and Pepper Potts told them hurriedly to come in.

As soon as the doors were closed, she took the bag from Stark and hurled it into the corner of the room with undue force and stabbed a finger at him telling to stay ‘right the fuck where you are.’ Louis got the feeling that Ms. Potts had just a smidge of trauma under all that poise.

When they explained how they’d come by said demon pod, she covered her mouth with her hands and said ‘oh no, Peter.’ Then she laid into Stark for a good two minutes berating him for not keeping a better eye on his protégé and not being involved in Spidey’s life enough, and Jesus, he could have _died_ , Tony.

“Honey, I see him every day. I am not neglecting him,” Stark defended.

Pepper Potts pointed furiously at the bag in the corner.

“I have no control over what he does in his own time, Pep. But I will give him another boundaries talk if it will make you happy.”

“It will,” she snapped.

Pepper Potts had a type extremis, or at least some residual effects of extremis, which she used to scare the living shit out of everyone but Stark in the room. Her hands burned right through the paper bag and the little piece of cloth inside. The pod turned black. Then it cracked, and the little seed inside jumped around sizzling.

Pepper Potts put the dead pod very delicately on the edge of her desk and told them that they could do whatever they wanted with it, so long as it was not within one hundred yards of her husband.

“Go check on Peter,” she ordered. Stark saluted her and went.

 

 

“Pete, I’m breaking into your house, I’m sorry in advance,” Stark said into the crack of the door. Louis wasn’t sure that’s how it was supposed to work, but he was saved from having to figure out when the door was ripped open, right off its hinges before anything could happen.

Peter, rather, Spidey, looked like shit, but an entirely different kind of shit than before. He looked more like he’d woken up with the worst hangover in the universe than a guy who’d been laying around just short of comatose. He was standing up, for one. Appeared to have launched himself from bed to the door to make sure he got there before his aunt did.

“Oh god, it’s just you,” he sighed and then sagged. Stark very gingerly tapped his hand to get him to let go of the door. Spidey seemed to realize then what he’d done and covered his mouth in horror.

“Oh my god, my deposit,” was what he had to say for himself.

 

 

Spidey joined them on the meeting roof a few nights later, but he wasn’t wearing his suit. Just that huge khaki jacket that he’d had since he was a kid. Louis thought that maybe it had once been his uncle’s.

“Bad news, everyone, I’m not your team leader anymore,” he announced through the wind slicing strips of cold into the skin on their faces. “I can’t be, I’m sorry.”

“Wait, what?” Angel asked. Her huge scarf buffeted in the wind. “What do you mean?”

Peter Parker stared at them with his dark eyes and square jaw, the ones he’d grown into at twenty-five years old. There was something there Louis hadn’t seen in his expression, but he couldn’t put his finger on it.

“I mean, I’m making shitty decisions and putting you guys in danger. I knew better than to fuck with the gate. And I knew whatever was going on with the readings would eventually solve itself; it always does. But I made myself responsible and got involved anyways because in my head, that’s what everyone expected me to do, and I nearly killed myself in the process. I won’t do that again. I am allowed to be selfish.”

‘I am allowed to be selfish,’ was a string of words who’s original form was ‘you are allowed to be selfish.’ It came from the mouth of another, someone holding their brother, sister, mother, friend, and telling them in no uncertain terms that they loved them, and that person needed to start loving themselves. It wasn’t raining, but the cold wind burned Louis’s skin like speeding raindrops.

Had it been May or Wade?

“I don’t want to lead you guys anymore,” Peter said with a widening grin, “But if it’s cool with y’all, I’m just gonna step down and call us equals?”

A huge rush of wind shook them all for a moment.

Then Angel screamed and threw herself into Peter’s arms and he laughed and caught her.

It was happiness in his eyes, that’s what it was. Relief.

It was a spark; some of that mischievous energy that kid had had, poking fun at Daredevil in the warehouse. Watching his two buddies wrestle over a little scrape of blood. Louis hadn’t recognized it because he’d never seen it before. He’d never been around Peter when he wasn’t trying to take care of everyone all at the same time.

Just a little bit of selfishness.

It was a good look on him.

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> it is out of my head and out of my hands and jesus fucking christ just let me write my goddamned dissertation
> 
> On a more serious note, this fic for me was really an exploration of ideas of what leadership looks like among Team Red, or the vigilantes in general. Everyone and no one on Team Red is a leader and everyone and no one on Team Red is a follower. That’s kind of the beauty of it; the main trio are so chaotic, the only way it could stay together and function is through equal partnership or shifting responsibilities.


End file.
